Vadim Ostanin, who had run Navalny’s native headquarters within the Siberian metropolis of Barnaul, had carried out solely “authorized political work”, Navalny’s group wrote on the Telegram app.
He was additionally discovered responsible of involvement in a non-profit group “whose exercise entails violence in opposition to 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 revealed by Navalny’s group.
“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 group 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 prices he says had been trumped as much as silence him. Final week Russian state prosecutors requested a court docket to jail him for an additional 20 years in a brand new legal trial for prices together with extremism.
Final month one other Navalny campaigner, Liliya Chanysheva, was sentenced to 7-1/2 years for “extremism”.
