Opposition leader Alexei Navalny defies jail threat as he announces return to Russia

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his wife Yulia

Credit: Instagram

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny said he will return to Russia this weekend despite the risk he could be jailed there, after months recovering in Germany from a nerve-agent poisoning. 

Mr Navalny announced he was “coming home” in a defiant social media post on Wednesday, a day after Russian authorities suggested they would seek to imprison him over a seven-year-old conviction. 

“It’s never been a question of whether I would return or not,” the opposition leader wrote on Instagram. “The fact is that I didn’t leave. I ended up in Germany … for one reason alone: they (Russian authorities) tried to kill me.”

This week, Russia’s prison service applied to a court to have Mr Navalny’s suspended sentence in an embezzlement case from 2014 converted to a real jail term. 

The service said he had failed to adhere to the conditions of his suspended sentence by refusing to return to Moscow in late December, while he was still recovering from his poisoning. 

Mr Navalny has long claimed the conviction was politically motivated. 

The 41-year-old said “servants” of President Vladimir Putin “are doing what they always do: fabricating new criminal cases against me.” 

Mr Navalny, Russia’s most outspoken critic of Mr Putin, fell suddenly ill on an internal flight last August and was briefly treated in a Siberian hospital before being transferred to Berlin at the request of his family. 

Laboratory tests showed he was poisoned with Novichok, the chemical that was used against former Russian agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. 

Mr Navalny and his supporters said Mr Putin was behind the attack, a charge the Kremlin has denied.

Mr Putin at the end of last year confirmed Russian agents had been trailing the opposition leader but said if they wanted to kill him they would have “finished the job”. 

Mr Navalny said on Wednesday he had largely recovered and was exercising again, after struggling even to stand up and lie down in the days after he was discharged from his Berlin hospital. 

“Russia is my country, Moscow is my city, and I miss both of them,” he wrote.