“The iron doors slam shut behind me with a deafening clang, but I feel like a free man,” Mr. Navalny wrote. “They can hold onto power, using it for personal gain, only by relying on our fear. But we, having overcome fear, can free our homeland from a little bunch of thieving occupiers.”
In court on Friday, Mr. Navalny tried to cast the slander case against him as a narrative concocted by Kremlin propaganda specialists who were seeking to take advantage of the Russian public’s sympathy for World War II veterans.
Mr. Navalny’s offense, according to prosecutors, was a tweet last June in which he described people appearing in a video agitating for Mr. Putin’s constitutional amendments as “traitors,” “people without a conscience.”
One of the people in that video was the veteran Ignat Artemenko, 94, whom prosecutors later picked out as a particular victim of Mr. Navalny’s alleged slander.
Mr. Artemenko appeared in court by video link, but the trial was soon interrupted because he was not feeling well and an ambulance had to be called, according to journalists in the courtroom.
“I told you that they’d need to call an ambulance for him!” Mr. Navalny said.
“Let the record show that it was Aleksei Anatolyevich Navalny who brought him to this state,” the prosecutor said.
Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Brussels, and Melissa Eddy from Berlin.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/world/europe/aleksei-navalny-russia-court.html
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