Putin is still Putin.

A Moscow court has sentenced Alexei Navalny to two years and eight months in a prison colony in a landmark decision for Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on the country’s leading opposition figure.

Calling it a “crackdown” makes it sound legitimate. The right word would be “suppression.”

Navalny, who has accused the Russian president and his allies of stealing billions, was jailed for violating parole from a 2014 sentence for embezzlement in a case he has said was politically motivated.

…

After a judge read the verdict, subtracting the 10 months he had spent under house arrest from his original three-and-a-half-year sentence, Navalny and his wife Yulia stared at each other across the court room. She took off her mask, smiled, waved, and then shrugged. “Don’t be sad! Everything’s going to be alright!” he yelled to her. She declined to comment as she walked out of the courtroom, looking straight ahead.

…

Outside the courthouse, she stood next to Navalny’s two lawyers, Olga Mikhailova and Vladimir Kobzev. They said they planned to appeal to the European Court on Human Rights. “You saw what happened in there,” Mikhailova said. “It was a horror, like always.”

Navalny’s team called for an urgent protest at Moscow’s Manezh Square by the Kremlin. As of 9.30pm, hundreds of riot police had begun detaining Navalny supporters.

Putin putining.

In a fiery speech from a Moscow city courtroom decorated with portraits of Cicero and Montesquieu ahead of the sentencing, Navalny had accused Putin of ordering his assassination with the poison novichok and said that the Russian leader’s “only method is killing people”.

The US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said Washington was “deeply concerned” and reiterated calls for Navalny’s unconditional and immediate release, saying it would coordinate with allies to hold Russia accountable.

At least our days of slobbering all over Putin are in the past.