Alexei Navalny no longer has a lawyer. The last one who was able to defend him, Alexander Fedulov, did not appear at the hearing where the politician appeared on Monday, October 16. "What's going on with my lawyers?" Navalny asked the few journalists present, through the screen where he was appearing from his prison in Melekhovo, in the Vladimir oblast, 250 km from Moscow. In the evening, lawyer Fedulov announced that he was "safe" abroad.

The toll is heavy – none of the opposition leader's five current or former lawyers are able to practice. Olga Mikhailova, his long-standing lawyer, also fled abroad. Vadim Kobzev, Alexei Liptser and Igor Sergunin were all arrested and remanded in custody on Friday.

The three men were searched before appearing one after the other in a cage at Moscow's Basmanny Justice court. Few details were given, except that they are accused of participating in an "extremist enterprise," that of aiding Navalny, whose various activities were declared illegal in 2021. They face up to six years in prison. According to people close to the opponent who were able to consult the court documents, the three lawyers are accused of having "used their status" to "pass information, for criminal purposes, between the participants and the leader of an extremist enterprise." In other words, they acted as intermediaries between the convict and the outside world.

With this attack on his defenders, the judiciary is seeking to complete the isolation in which Navalny is immersed, imprisoned for at least 19 years, the longest sentence that he has been given. In the more than 1,000 days he has been in detention, the opponent has spent 224 in solitary confinement, in a bare concrete cell measuring 2x3 meters.

This vexatious treatment, accompanied by more informal pressure, is explained by Navalny's refusal to be forgotten and to give up politics. On a regular basis, he manages to get messages across, in writing or orally, which are then published on social media. In them, the opponent recounts his living conditions, often with humor, and continues to attack Vladimir Putin's regime and the war in Ukraine. These posts irritate the authorities and have probably prompted the launch of legal proceedings against his legal team. Without them, the opponent is also deprived of all access to the news.

Recently, Navalny also learned that he was to be transferred to a solitary confinement cell known as "EPKT" for a period of one year. Very similar to solitary confinement but intended for longer periods, the cell drastically limits visits to a maximum of one visit per six-month period, which the administration can cancel at will.

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