Today, a provincial court in the Russian city of Kirov sentenced Aleksey Navalny, the only real leader to emerge among the opposition since the fall of the Soviet Union, to five years in a prison camp, and slapped him with a hefty fine for an embezzlement scheme so convoluted it could only be fiction: He was accused, as he liked to put it, of “stealing a forest.”

It goes like this: While serving as a volunteer advisor to the governor of Kirov in 2008, Navalny tried to reform the local lumber industry. This, in turn, served as fodder for opening a case against him when he started digging into the corrupt dealings of government officials and state companies on his well-trafficked blog. The charge was that Navalny set up terms of trade that were unprofitable for the Kirov government, and, as a result, cost them one million rubles, or $30,000, for which he faced up to seven years in jail.

But as Navalny’s stature and political power among the urban middle class grew, the case, closed countless times by local prosecutors, kept being reopened. Last summer, after months of anti-Kremlin protests by a constituency Navalny had done much to create and mobilize, Navalny’s home was searched and ransacked by the Investigative Committee—the Russian FBI. Shortly thereafter, the head of the Investigative Committee, Alexandr Bastrykin—Putin’s classmate and close friend—growled at his subordinates in a public (and terrifying) meeting, that the Committee was to go after this man “with the last name Navalny” without “lowing” like cowards. Almost immediately, the case was reopened and the sum Navalny allegedly stole suddenly jumped to 16 million rubles, or $500,000. And now he faced up to ten years in jail.

There was no way that Navalny wouldn’t be found guilty, or that he would somehow escape being sent to prison, despite rumors—based more on desperation and hope than on any reality—that he’d get a suspended sentence. Putin had clearly given his buddy Bastrykin a carte blanche to tighten the screws on the opposition that, after a disputed parliamentary election in December 2011, had been protesting by the tens of thousands. Navalny’s case was one of many; as Josh Yaffa reported for TNR, over two dozen people had also been swept up in the disciplinary dragnet. It didn’t help Navalny’s case that, as if in response to the ramped up charges, he published information on his blog that Bastrykin owned a business in the Czech Republic, where he also had established permanent residency. (Imagine, for example, if Robert Mueller was found to have residency in, say, Costa Rica.)

Not that it really hurt Navalny either. There was no way that, with someone like Bastrykin calling for his head, Navalny wasn’t going to jail, and he knew it. He didn’t like to hypothesize and fantasize, but he was always very straightforward—and often glib and funny—about the risks he took. As the judge speed-read through the 100-page verdict and anxiety in the Russian language Twitter universe picked up, he asked his followers to stop being so sad and posted a picture of the Joker asking, “Why so serious?”