Far from the streets of Moscow where he galvanized tens of thousands in anti-government protests, Alexei Navalny faces trial this week on charges that could send him to prison for 10 years.

The trial, starting Wednesday in Kirov, 800 kilometers (500 miles) northeast of Moscow, accuses Navalny and his former colleague Pyotr Ofitserov of leading an organized criminal group that embezzled 16 million rubles ($500,000) worth of timber from a state-run company.

The charges not only threaten him with serious prison time, but strike at the essence of his image as a vociferous anti-corruption campaigner.

Even before Navalny became a key figure in the anti-government protests that erupted in 2011, the lawyer was a persistent thorn in the establishment’s side with his extensive blogging on Russia‘s staggering high-level corruption. Authorities admit the trial is connected to his prominent activities, although they deny overt political motivations.

Navalny, 36, insists the charges are a fabrication intended to silence him on the orders of President Vladimir Putin, who has cracked down on dissent since returning for a third term last year.

“Everyone’s known for years that if Putin ever made the decision to shut me down, then he’ll shut me down,” Navalny said Monday.

Navalny’s conviction appears all but certain. More than 99 percent of Russian trials end with a guilty verdict, according to Vadim Volkov and Kirill Titaev of the European University at St. Petersburg.

The charges were filed by the Investigative Committee, an FBI-like body solely accountable to Putin. Normally, the agency only handles high-profile crime and would leave a small alleged embezzlement case like Navalny’s to local authorities. But since Putin’s return to the presidency last May, the committee has become a highly politicized instrument at the front lines of his crackdown on dissent, filing charges against activists and loudly proclaiming their guilt in state-owned media.

In an interview Friday in the newspaper Izvestia, Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said investigators would not have looked into a “banal theft” if not for Navalny’s investigations, which implicated high-ranking officials in corruption.

“If a person tries hard to attract attention, or if I can put it, teases authorities — ‘look at me, I’m so good compared to everyone else’ — well, then one gets more interested in his past and the process

From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/QJe060CYzag/