Russian state prosecutors are poised to jail the opposition leader Alexei Navalny for three-and-a-half years, with the Kremlin shrugging off US complaints about his case on Monday ahead of a crucial court hearing on Tuesday.
Navalny – who was jailed after flying back to Moscow last month – faces the prospect of a lengthy spell behind bars. Vladimir Putin’s press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Moscow would ignore statements from the Biden administration, following Sunday’s mass pro-Navalny protests.
After demonstrators took to the streets in 90 towns and cities across the country riot police responded with a major show of force. They made a record number of arrests, detaining 5,300 people, including Navalny’s wife, Yulia, who was seized in north-east Moscow.
The Kremlin’s apparent strategy is to tough out growing street protests, which are likely to continue on Tuesday when Navalny appears in court. Moscow’s prison service has demanded a three-and-a-half year sentence for alleged parole violations.
Navalny says the charges are fake and politically motivated. He is accused of failing to meet his parole officer while he was in Germany recovering from novichok poisoning. Navalny alleges Putin authorised a bungled FSB spy agency operation last August to kill him in Siberia.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has condemned Moscow’s heavy-handed tactics against peaceful protesters and journalists and has called for Navalny to be set free. “We are deeply disturbed by this violent crackdown against people exercising their rights to protest peacefully against their government,” he said.
Profile Who is Alexei Navalny?
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Born in 1976 just outside Moscow, Alexei Navalny is a lawyer-turned-campaigner whose Anti-Corruption Foundation investigates the wealth of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
He started out as a Russian nationalist, but emerged as the main leader of Russia’s democratic opposition during the wave of protests that led up to the 2012 presidential election, and has since been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side.
Navalny is barred from appearing on state television, but has used social media to his advantage. A 2017 documentary accusing the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, of corruption received more than 30m views on YouTube within two months.
He has been repeatedly arrested and jailed. The European court of human rights ruled that Russia violated Navalny’s rights by holding him under house arrest in 2014. Election officials barred him from running for president in 2018 due to an embezzlement conviction that he claims was politically motivated. Navalny told the commission its decision would be a vote ‘not against me, but against 16,000 people who have nominated me; against 200,000 volunteers who have been canvassing for me’.
There has also been a physical price to pay. In April 2017, he was attacked with green dye that nearly blinded him in one eye, and in July 2019 he was taken from jail to hospital with symptoms that one of his doctors said could indicate poisoning. In 2020, he was again hospitalised after a suspected poisoning, and taken to Germany for treatment. The German government later said toxicology results showed Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.
Photograph: Pavel Golovkin/AP
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Blinken said frustration with official corruption and growing autocracy had driven popular protests: “I think they [Kremlin officials] need to look inward, not outward … Mr Navalny is giving expression to the voices of millions and millions of Russians. And that’s what this is about.”
The White House was reviewing whether to impose further sanctions in the wake of Moscow’s “deeply disturbing” actions, Blinken said. These included the recent SolarWinds cyber-hack on US federal institutions, and claims Russia was offering bounty payments to Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.
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Юлия Навальная вышла сегодня на акцию протеста. Она у Сокольников. Фото: instagram / yulia_navalnaya pic.twitter.com/0Cn9zdoLZW
January 31, 2021
Speaking on Monday, Peskov warned against fresh sanctions. “We are not prepared to accept or heed American statements about this,” he said. He described the pro-Navalny protests as illegal. “There can be no conversation with hooligans and provocateurs, the law should be applied with the utmost severity,” he told reporters.
Navalny’s allies have released a list of Putin-linked oligarchs and officials and called on the west to sanction them. So far, however, neither Boris Johnson nor Joe Biden have taken action. Biden and Putin spoke by phone last week for the first time since the president’s inauguration.
Navalny, 44, is serving a 30-day stint in jail. His wife appeared at Shcherbinsky court in Moscow on Monday and was fined 20,000 roubles (£192) for taking part in what the authorities say was an unsanctioned protest. Her lawyer, Svetlana Davydova, said she would appeal.
Moscow’s detention centres are overflowing, with 1,800 people arrested in the capital last weekend, Novaya Gazeta reported on Monday. Some protesters have been kept for days in police wagons, with others transferred to a detention centre for migrants, the paper said.
Pavel Chikov, a lawyer and rights advocate, said police had opened 40 criminal cases in 18 different regions related to the two weekends of rallies. Navalny has called on his supporters to gather outside the Moscow court during his hearing on Tuesday, which the authorities are certain to characterise as an illegal protest.
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