A Russian court on Friday sentenced three lawyers for the late opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny to as much as five and a half years in prison for passing on correspondence from him to his allies, a clear reminder of how the Kremlin is still pursuing his associates even after his death.
The three lawyers — Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Aleksei Liptser — were arrested in October 2023 while Mr. Navalny was in a high-security prison colony in Siberia, in a stark warning that the Kremlin was intent on severing Mr. Navalny’s links to the outside world.
The city court in Petushki, about 80 miles east of Moscow, convicted the three lawyers, all of whom represented Mr. Navalny at some point over the past decade, of involvement in an extremist group, Russian news agencies reported from the courtroom.
Even from prison, Mr. Navalny was the most popular opposition figure in Russia, defiantly challenging the rule of President Vladimir V. Putin, and the authorities banned his nationwide movement as extremist shortly before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Mr. Kobzev was sentenced to five and a half years in prison, Mr. Liptser to five years and Igor Sergunin, the only one of the three to plead guilty, to three and a half years.
Yulia Navalnaya, Mr. Navalny’s widow, in a statement on Friday, called the three lawyers political prisoners and urged their release. And Lyubov Sobol, one of Mr. Navalny’s longstanding allies, said on X that the ruling was “dictated by the Kremlin and seeks to take revenge against those who stayed by Navalny’s side till the end.”
Prosecutors said during the trial that the lawyers “used their position” to pass along Mr. Navalny’s correspondence from a prison colony in Petushki, where he spent time before being transferred to Siberia, to his allies in Russia and abroad.
In their ruling, the court agreed with their claim that doing so had allowed Mr. Navalny “to carry out his role as the leader and head of an extremist organization.”
Two other lawyers for Mr. Navalny, Olga Mikhailova and Alexandr Fedulov, were charged in absentia because they had fled the country. Their case has yet to be heard.
Mr. Navalny was serving a 19-year prison sentence on several charges when he died at a high-security prison colony in February last year. The Russian authorities attributed his death to a series of diseases aggravated by heart arrhythmia, a conclusion that was strongly rejected by his family and allies, who blamed the Kremlin for his death.
Some of the letters and prison diaries that the lawyers helped to get out of the Petushki prison were included in Mr. Navalny’s memoir, which was published posthumously late last year.
Mr. Navalny’s lawyers argued in the trial that they were being prosecuted for routine legal work, such as liaising between a client and their family or associates.
Mr. Kobzev, who worked side by side with the opposition leader, told the court that “we are being tried for transmitting Navalny’s thoughts to other people,” according to the Novaya Gazeta newspaper.
The three lawyers had been placed in a cage in the courtroom, and at the start of the hearing on Friday, supporters chanted “We’re proud of you! You’re Russia’s best people!” as they smiled to supporters and journalists, according to social media footage.
In an apparent attempt to dampen the show of support, the police on Friday morning detained four journalists and one supporter as they arrived by train in Petushki. They were released without being charged after the verdict was announced, according to Mediazona, an independent media outlet in Russia.
The prosecution of the lawyers was in keeping with the Kremlin’s attempt to isolate Mr. Navalny, who managed to remain an important voice in Russian politics despite his incarceration, and his Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Lawyers who represented their three colleagues told reporters outside the court they were not intimidated by the prosecution. “Things can be different but being a lawyer is not about getting scared,” said one, Denis Leisle, who represents Mr. Liptser, speaking to Mediazona.
Ivan Zhdanov, chairman of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, said the ruling would set a dangerous precedent for the country’s legal system, because people could be held liable for something as innocuous as passing along correspondence.
“Lawyers already knew they were being monitored during meetings with their clients,” he wrote on his Telegram channel. “Now they will know they were being monitored, recorded and that this could be used against them in court to convict them.”
