Russia Jails 13 in Two-Year Putin Protest Trial

A Moscow court on Monday jailed three activists for up to three-and-a-half years as it wrapped up an explosive two-year trial that put 13 behind bars for protests over Vladimir Putin's presidential return.

The May 2012 clashes between protesters and police spelled a bloody end to months of unprecedented street discontent with Putin's decision to swap his prime minister's seat with then-president Dmitry Medvedev and extend his dominance over Russia by at least six more years.

The tumult briefly troubled other big cities and openly challenged Putin for the first time since the former Soviet spy rose from complete obscurity to become Boris Yeltsin's anointed successor in 1999.

A visibly shaken Kremlin accused Washington of plotting the unrest to unseat Putin and then launched a wholesale political crackdown that brought Russia ever closer to its Soviet one-party past.

Moscow's Zamoskvoretsky District Court jailed Alexei Gaskarov and Alexander Margolin for three-and-a-half years for taking part in mass riots and the "use of violence against a representative of the authority that does not endanger human life or health."

The court jailed Ilya Gushin for two-and-a-half years and gave Natalia Susina a suspended sentence over the same offense.

Police outside the central Moscow court -- already renowned for sending Putin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky to prison for a decade on disputed business charges -- bundled into a waiting security van three people who had unfurled a "Russia is not a prison" banner in silent defiance.

The defense team said it would file a long-shot appeal despite the judge's decision to issue a slightly more lenient sentence than the prosecution's four-year jail term request.

Four of the 13 people jailed during the trial were released under a broad amnesty Putin issued in a seeming attempt to improve his image ahead of the February Sochi Winter Olympic Games.

Protest organizers Sergei Udaltsov and his fellow radical Left Front movement leader Leonid Razvozzhayev are both serving 4.5-year jail sentences linked to the May 2012 altercation and other charges.

Amnesty International has denounced the entire process as "political" and several opposition leaders who previously held government posts called the verdicts a part of a Kremlin intimidation tactic designed to keep critics silent and afraid.

"The point of (Putin's) policies is to keep society constantly frightened, to maintain this constant sense of fear," said former deputy prime minister Vladimir Ryzhkov.

"There are no rational reasons for these repressions, no legal grounds to jail people," he told Moscow Echo radio.

But such words of outrage find far less support today than they did when more than 100,000 braved Arctic weather to chant "Russia without Putin" in the heart of Moscow in December 2011.

Putin's approval rating has soared to above 80 percent thanks to patriotic fervor that has stirred up over Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula and its decision to stand up to Western sanctions with bans on almost all U.S. and European food.

An August poll by the respected Levada Center found 61 percent of respondents agreeing that Russia was threatened "by numerous foreign and domestic foes".