Vadim Ostanin: Russia jails Navalny campaigner for nine years for ‘extremism’

The previous head of an area department of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny‘s marketing campaign organisation was sentenced to 9 years in a Russian jail for collaborating in an “extremist group”, Navalny’s crew mentioned on Monday.

Vadim Ostanin, who had run Navalny’s native headquarters within the Siberian metropolis of Barnaul, had carried out solely “authorized political work”, Navalny’s crew wrote on the Telegram app.
He was additionally discovered responsible of involvement in a non-profit group “whose exercise entails violence towards residents”.

Ostanin was arrested in December 2021 and held in Moscow earlier than being transferred to Barnaul, the place he stood trial.
“Upon my arrival in Barnaul from Moscow, with out rationalization, I used to be positioned in a solitary cell, about six sq. metres, in a basement with a window lined with particles,” Ostanin wrote in a letter printed by Navalny’s crew.
“A couple of week later, the cell was flooded with ankle-deep water…In these cells there have been rats, ants, spiders,” he wrote.
Navalny’s crew wrote that investigators had pressured Ostanin to confess his guilt, however he refused.
Navalny, Putin’s best-known critic, is serving sentences totalling 11-1/2 years in a penal colony on fraud and different expenses he says have been trumped as much as silence him. Final week Russian state prosecutors requested a court docket to jail him for one more 20 years in a brand new felony trial for expenses together with extremism.
Final month one other Navalny campaigner, Liliya Chanysheva, was sentenced to 7-1/2 years for “extremism”.