OREANDA-NEWS. In the Babushkinsky Court of Moscow at a visiting session of the magistrate court on Friday, February 12, the hearings against the well-known opposition leader Alexei Navalny on the criminal case of defamation of the veteran resumed. The detained politician personally participates in the court session. This time, journalists are not allowed to pass with water and even antiseptics, the DW correspondent reports.

According to the prosecution, on June 2, 2020, Navalny posted on Twitter and Telegram a video of the RT TV channel calling on Russians to accept amendments to the Constitution and accompanied it with a comment «containing deliberately false information discrediting the honor and dignity of veteran Ignat Artemenko». The investigation found, that the politician thus committed slander (Part 2 of Article 128.1 of the Criminal Code).

At the previous hearing on February 5, the veteran's grandson and the opposition leader began to find out who filed a complaint with law enforcement agencies in the case of libel. The veteran's grandson Igor Kolesnikov said, that neither he nor his grandfather wrote this statement. Navalny told the judge, that the case was fabricated, and the grandson of the victim provides false information. According to the opposition leader, the prosecutor requested a break in the meeting, because Navalny «caught the witness in a lie».

Alexey Navalny, who returned to Russia from Germany on January 17 after treatment for the effects of poisoning with a substance from the «Novichok» group, was sentenced on February 2 to 2 years and 8 months in prison on charges of violating the obligations of a probationer in the case of the cosmetics company «Yves Rocher». As part of this case, Alexey Navalny and his brother Oleg were found guilty of embezzlement in December 2014. If the decision of the Simonovsky court against Navalny comes into force, he will be released in October 2023.