The crime of letters. Russian court upholds prison terms for Navalny’s former lawyers

Three of Alexei Navalny’s lawyers, Vadim Kobzev, Alexei Liptser and Igor Sergunin, were arrested on October 13, 2023, a few months before the opposition leader’s murder in prison, accused of “participating in an extremist community”. Investigators alleged that the lawyers “used their status” to regularly pass letters from the opposition leader to his associates, allowing Navalny to “continue to carry out the functions of a leader and head of an extremist community” from behind bars.

Sergunin had pleaded guilty Then, the lawyers were moved from Moscow to Vladimir region where Navalny’s first prison after his return to Russia in January 2021 was located. 

In January 2025, Vadim Kobzev (now 42) was sentenced to five and a half years in a penal colony, Alexei Liptser (now 38) to five years, and Igor Sergunin (now 46) to three and a half years.

The prosecution had asked the court to add a few months to each term, arguing the original punishments were too lenient. They also asked judges to strip away mitigating factors cited at the original sentencing for Kobzev and Liptser, specifically the court’s finding about their family’s difficult financial circumstances.

During trial, Liptser’s lawyer Anna Stavitskaya slammed the original verdict as a near-verbatim copy of the prosecution’s indictment: out of 230 pages of the verdict, 215 repeat the indictment word-for-word. Liptser noted that the “extremist community” verdict against him was shoddily fabricated and contained numerous disqualifying errors. His defence also noted his severely deteorating health.

Andrei Grivtsov, defending Kobzev, argued that the very foundation of legal defence was at stake. “If you say that this is possible, then the legal profession will end,” he told the court. “It will be impossible to defend people. They will not trust you.”

In his final remarks, Vadim Kobzev announced that he would speak to two imaginary interlocutors: Josef Švejk, the hapless soldier from Jaroslav Hašek’s satirical novel, and an unseen moderator from an “ontological battle” in Honoré de Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. He joked that the judges should forgive his literary excesses, explaining that during months of detention he had read more than 200 books, often for eight hours a day.

“Like Hašek’s hero [Švejk], I am accused of preparing an uprising,” he said. “The chain of synonyms is easy to continue: revolution, coup d’état, rebellion, mutiny, conspiracy. In pre-revolutionary criminal law it was called ‘an attempt to overthrow the existing system’, or ‘an encroachment on the form of government’, while in Soviet jurisprudence it was ‘anti-Soviet conspiratorial activity’. My charge is as old as the world.”

He stressed that the key word of their case was “letters”. “It appears in the verdict hundreds of times. The letters of Alexei Navalny. I listened to them from the author himself, I took them from his hands, I wrote them down in my own hand, I discussed them with him, I retold them to other people. So it is written in the verdict.” Among the letters for which he was convicted, he said, was Navalny’s interview with The New York Times. “The court decided that with this interview Navalny was overthrowing power in Russia.”

Kobzev reminded the court that others had once stood accused of the same offence, including Fyodor Dostoevsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He noted that Solzhenitsyn had even been later received in person by Vladimir Putin, and that a school in the Vladimir region now bears his name. He added: “Under [Emperor] Nicholas I you could get four years for letters, under Stalin eight. I was given something in between. You must now decide how many years letters earn under Putin.”

He mentioned that their case is “a trifle, a private tragedy of three Moscow families”; however, he sought to address those beyond the courtroom: “And to you, respected listeners and readers of my words, I say: see you in 2028.”

The three-judge panel rejected the prosecution’s appeal but upheld the original prison terms, making only minor amendments to post-release restrictions.

According to their defence teams, all three men are now formally eligible for parole. However, standard practice by the FSIN, the prison service, means they are unlikely to be considered for at least six months. For Igor Sergunin, this means he will almost certainly serve his full sentence.