Ksenia Fadeeva received a nine-year prison sentence for alleged extremism tied to her collaboration with Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is serving nearly 30 years in an Arctic prison.
Fadeeva was found guilty of coordinating extremist organization activities by the Soviet District Court in the Siberian city of Tomsk, as reported by the digital platform Mediazona.
The opposition figure, who led Navalny’s team in Tomsk and was elected as a municipal Duma deputy in 2020, also faces accusations of involvement in an NGO that allegedly violated citizens’ rights.
Her defense attorney, Semion Vodnev, labeled the verdict as “illegal, unfounded, and unjust” and plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Fadeeva was the last person to see Navalny before his poisoning in August 2020, an incident the opposition figure directly attributed to President Vladimir Putin.
Initially detained in late 2021 due to her association with the imprisoned political figure and his Anti-Corruption Foundation, declared extremist that same year for exposing illicit enrichment in public administration.
Navalny was poisoned on August 20 while preparing to leave Tomsk, Siberia’s prominent university city, where he had traveled to expose high local officials’ corruption and support opposition candidates.
“I met with Navalny the day before his poisoning. He spent three days in the city preparing for the elections. I left him at the hotel and didn’t see him after that,” Fadeeva previously told the news agency EFE.
Navalny accuses the Federal Security Service (FSB) of orchestrating a covert operation using the chemical agent Novichok—developed by Soviet scientists and supposed to have been destroyed, per international conventions—to poison the Kremlin’s number one foe.
Consequently, several opposition figures, including Ksenia Fadeeva, urged the investigative committee to launch a criminal investigation against the secret services.
Navalny, a vocal critic of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine and a campaigner against Putin’s 2024 reelection (elections where in the last days a strong opposition figure was banned to compete), was recently transferred to a prison in the Arctic Circle.
