Verdicts against trio suggest legal representatives are latest target of Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent.

Russia has sentenced three lawyers who had defended Alexei Navalny to several years in prison for bringing messages from the late opposition leader from prison to the outside world.

The case, which comes amid a widespread crackdown on dissent during the Ukraine offensive, has alarmed rights groups that fear Moscow will ramp up trials against legal representatives in addition to jailing their clients.

The Kremlin has sought to punish Navalny’s associates even after his unexplained death in an Arctic prison colony last February.

Vadim Kobzev, Alexei Liptser and Igor Sergunin were found guilty of participating in an “extremist organisation” by a court in the town of Petushki.

Kobzev, the most high-profile member of Navalny’s legal team, was sentenced to five and a half years, while Liptser was handed five years and Sergunin three and a half years.

The sentences drew outrage in the west.

The trio were almost the only people visiting Navalny in prison while he served his 19-year sentence.

Navalny, Putin’s main political opponent, communicated with the world by transmitting messages through his lawyers, which his team then published on social media.

Passing letters and messages through lawyers is a normal practice in Russian prisons.

Navalny’s exiled widow, Yulia Navalnaya, said the lawyers were “political prisoners and should be freed immediately”.

The US, Britain, France and Germany all criticised the sentences.

“This is yet another example of the persecution of defence lawyers by the Kremlin in its effort to undermine human rights, subvert the rule of law and suppress dissent,” the US state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said in a statement.

Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, called on the Kremlin to “release all political prisoners”.

France’s foreign ministry called the court ruling “yet another act of intimidation against the legal profession as a whole”, while Germany said that “even those meant to defend others before the law face harsh persecution”.

The lawyers were sentenced after a closed-door trial in Petushki – about 70 miles east of Moscow – near the Pokrov prison where Navalny was held before he was moved to a remote colony above the Arctic circle.

Photo: Igor Sergunin, Alexei Liptser and Vadim Kobzev were found guilty of participating in an ‘extremist organisation’ by the court in Petushki.

Photograph: Yulia Morozova/Reuters.