Putin's poisonous prisoner

Alexei Navalny, the man Putin tried to poison, has been sent to prison for two years and eight months — conveniently keeping him out of the way until long after September’s parliamentary elections. It’s fair to say this was no great surprise. The trial was typically stage-managed, Navalny locked in a glass box during the day-long proceedings that combined the surreal and the sinister.

The term represents the three and a half years suspended sentence Navalny was given in a 2014 trial — where the evidence was so flimsy as to be virtually translucent — less time already served. The European Court of Human Rights had ruled that trial ‘arbitrary and unfair’, but with such political cases, there need be no crime for punishment.

This is Putin’s power: the capacity to deploy the state with virtually no checks and balances. However, Navalny responded with his power: a barnstorming court speech that was not a plea for mitigation or a defence but instead a challenge and a manifesto.