Russia is jailing lawyers who worked for late opposition leader Alexei Navalny

Three lawyers who represented the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny have been sentenced to five and a half years in prison on charges of being part of an “extremist organization”.

Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexei Liptser were arrested in October 2023 as Russian authorities stepped up pressure on the jailed Kremlin critic, who died suddenly last February in an Arctic prison.

They were tried behind closed doors in Petushki, a city east of Moscow, and accused of “using their status” to pass messages between Navalny and his colleagues.

Navalny had criticized the case as Soviet times, and a reference to the “state of law in Russia”.

Igor Sergunin was the only one of the three to plead guilty, according to independent reports, and was given a light sentence of three and a half years.

Alexei Liptser was sentenced to five years in a penal colony and Vadim Kobzev was given five and a half years.

Kobzev's lawyer, Andrei Grivtsov, said their testimony amounted to an illegal invasion of privacy.

“They are not allowed to listen to the meetings between the lawyer and the client in the penalty area – there is a specific ban,” he told BBC Russian.

The three lawyers were tried near the Pokrov penal colony, where Navalny was initially sent when he returned to Russia in January 2021, having survived a nerve agent attack he blamed on Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

The Kremlin denied the allegations and Navalny lived in the Russian colonies until his death, north of the Arctic Circle and 1,900km (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, blamed Putin for his death, which authorities said was a “sudden death”.