Anti-Putin protest leader Alexei Navalny (C) has been convicted of embezzlement by a Russian court. Source: AAP
A COURT in Russia's northern Kirov region has sentenced protest leader Alexei Navalny to five years in a penal colony after finding him guilty of embezzlement in a timber deal.
"Navalny... committed a grave crime," said Judge Sergei Blinov as he delivered the sentence on Thursday.
Navalny hugged his wife and mother and was then handcuffed by court bailiffs who led him away, an AFP correspondent in court reported.
Blinov earlier on Thursday found Navalny guilty of colluding to steal money in a timber deal while acting as an unpaid advisor to the local government in the Kirov region.
His co-accused, Pyotr Ofitserov, was also found guilty and sentenced to four years imprisonment.
Navalny, 37, who emerged as a powerful new political force in mass anti-Putin protests that broke out in December 2011, has dismissed the charges against him as absurd and a set-up to end his budding political career.
Prosecutors in the regional capital of Kirov, a sleepy city 900 kilometres north of Moscow, were seeking a six-year prison colony sentence.
But the conviction alone will remove Navalny from politics once the appeals process is over.
Navalny had bluntly predicted on his blog ahead of his trial that he would be found guilty and that Putin would be behind the decision.
The verdict and sentence come a day after Navalny was accepted as a candidate for the high-profile Moscow mayoral race in September.
But his election chief Leonid Volkov said after the sentencing that Navalny was pulling out of the mayoral race and calling on his supporters to boycott the vote.
The trial is seen by the opposition as part of a wider crackdown on activists who took to the streets to demand an end to Putin's rule in the run-up to his return to the Kremlin in May 2012 for a third term.
Many have spent months in cells awaiting trial and face long jail terms for crowd violence.
With his streetwise rhetoric and charisma, Navalny emerged as the most effective of the opposition leaders who led the unprecedented protests against Putin.
Navalny has said he wants to challenge Putin in the next presidential elections in 2018.
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