Anti-Corruption Foundation Director Ivan Zhdanov says FSB implicating him in pro-war blogger’s death as pretext for increasing Navalny’s prison sentence

Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Alexey Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), said Thursday that he believes the Russian authorities’ allegation that the organization was involved in the April 2 killing of pro-war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky is part of a strategy to extend Navalny’s prison sentence.

 “They need terrorism right now so they can give Navalny a longer term. I think this will be a separate episode in his case. They’ll declare FBK a terrorist organization, which was also predictable,” Zhdanov said in a statement on Telegram.

Earlier, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said that Daria Trepova, who is under investigation for Tatarsky’s murder, was inspired to kill the blogger after “repeated [public] appeals” from Zhdanov and his colleague Leonid Volkov for Russians to engage in “subversive activities.”

According to Zhdanov, the FSB’s story is baseless. “It’s clear from the video [of the explosion that killed Tatarsky] that the girl didn’t know there was a bomb there. How could she have ‘committed a terrorist attack in response to an appeal’ if she didn’t know she had a bomb?” he wrote.