Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, on Tuesday lost his appeal against a new 19-year sentence that would have increased his total term to more than 30 years, Reuters reported.

After the hearing, which was closed to the press despite protests from Navalny and his lawyers, he listened as Judge Viktor Rogov reviewed his criminal record before telling him his sentence would remain unchanged.

Now 47-year-old Navalny is at risk of being transferred to a “special regime” colony — the strictest level in Russia’s penitentiary system.

He rejects all the allegations against him, which have ranged over the years from fraud and contempt of court to a series of “extremist” acts, as attempts to force him to stop criticizing President Vladimir Putin.

Daniel Kholodny, a TV technician who worked for Navalny, was sentenced to eight years in prison in August in the same trial. And his appeal was rejected on Tuesday.

“Alexei, see you!” Kholodny shouted after the judge finished speaking. Navalny waved his hand in response.

“For all of us – their colleagues and friends – this is a constant pain,” Navalny’s aide Leonid Volkov wrote on the X platform, formerly Twitter. “And the constant challenge: to do everything possible every day to destroy the maniac in the Kremlin.”

Putin never says his name

The Kremlin has tried to portray Navalny as politically irrelevant, while Putin tries never to mention his name. Moscow portrayed him as an extremist and, without providing evidence, a puppet of the US Central Intelligence Agency.

Navalny is arguably the most prominent figure in Russia’s divided opposition, with supporters seeing him as a Nelson Mandela-style figure who will one day be released from prison to lead the country.

His political movement was outlawed, and its central figures were arrested or fled to St.

wounding as part of a crackdown on dissent that has intensified since Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.

Volodymyr Kara-Murza, another outspoken critic of the Kremlin who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in April on charges of treason and lying about the war, was transferred to a maximum-security penal colony in Siberia last week, according to his lawyer.

Navalny’s latest 19-year sentence was handed down on August 4 after he was convicted on six counts related to alleged extremist activities, which he denied.

The conviction follows 11-and-a-half years he has already served at the IK-6 penitentiary in Melekhovo, about 235 km east of Moscow, for fraud and other charges he has also dismissed as politically motivated.

Navalny won worldwide admiration for voluntarily returning to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he was being treated for what Western laboratory tests showed was an attempted poisoning with a neurochemical agent in Siberia.

He was detained immediately upon arrival. The Kremlin has denied an attempt to kill him, and Putin has commented: “If someone wanted to poison him, they would have finished him off.”