A new trial against jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has begun inside the maximum-security prison east of the capital, Moscow, where he is held.
Navalny is accused of fresh fraud charges. He has already spent a year behind bars after surviving a poison attack that he blames on the Kremlin.
He is currently serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence.
This latest trial could see his prison time extended by more than a decade.
Navalny, 45, was detained when he returned to Russia in January 2021, after months of treatment in Germany for a near-fatal Novichok nerve agent attack in Siberia.
The following month he was jailed for three-and-a-half years for violating the conditions of a suspended sentence in an embezzlement case. Navalny insists the charges were politically motivated but he could not have met the conditions anyway as he was in a coma for some of the time.
This video can not be played
To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.
The new charges allege that Mr Navalny stole $4.7m (£3.5m) of donations given to his political organisations.
They carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
His wife, Yuliya Navalnaya, was at the hearing at the jail in Pokrov, having demanded access to the closed-door proceedings a day earlier.
His close colleague Leonid Volkov tweeted that for a change Navalny was not being tried inside the usual “cage”. That was because the whole court was a cage as it was inside his penal colony, he said.
Amnesty International described the hearing as a “sham trial, attended by prison guards rather than the media”.
“It’s obvious that the Russian authorities intend to ensure that Navalny doesn’t leave prison any time soon,” it said in a statement on Monday.
Navalny runs an anti-corruption foundation called FBK that has highlighted graft in Mr Putin’s United Russia party and published a widely viewed video alleging that the president’s rich associates gave him a luxurious Black Sea palace.
Last year, a court in Moscow banned political organisations linked to him, classifying them as “extremist”.
