The Kremlin has attempted to play down the jailing of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, saying that his 32-month imprisonment will have not have “significant influence” on Russian politics or lead to a mass protest movement similar to the one in neighbouring Belarus.
Meanwhile, protesters detained at recent rallies in support of Navalny have complained of inhumane conditions as police hold them in overcrowded jails or on buses in subzero temperatures days after their arrest.
Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson told reporters on Wednesday that Putin had not reacted to Navalny’s speech in a Moscow courtroom, where he said the Russian leader would go down in history as “Vladimir Putin, the poisoner of underpants”.
“I don’t think that the convict you’ve mentioned can speak about the place Putin will occupy in history,” said Dmitri Peskov, the spokesperson. “Absolutely not. This is for the people of the country to say.”
He went on to say that Putin was too busy with issues such as mortgages that affect “millions and millions of Russians” to follow the Navalny case. It came to a dramatic conclusion on Tuesday evening as the opposition leader was jailed for allegedly violating his parole.
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.
Navalny was sent to prison again in February 2021, sentenced to two years and eight months, in a move that triggered marches in Moscow and the arrest of more than 1,000 protesters
Photograph: Pavel Golovkin/AP
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Red Square was closed and Moscow streets were cordoned off before the decision, as thousands of riot police were deployed across the Russian capital to prevent unrest. Still, the Kremlin claims Putin has taken little interest in the case in an apparent effort to downplay Navalny’s importance to the Russian public.
“It would be stupid if Putin, instead of [his normal work], listened to speeches by convicts or thought about his place in history,” Peskov said.
Peskov did address Tuesday’s protests against the Navalny ruling, defending a brutal crackdown by armoured riot police wielding batons that led to more than 1,150 arrests in Moscow alone.
Tatiana Stanovaya, a political analyst and founder of R.Politik, said that the harsh sentence against Navalny was part of a campaign to “demonstrate that no move aimed against the security services would remain unpunished”.
She said the government was ready to weather the backlash to Navalny’s imprisonment, whether it be international condemnation or street demonstrations in Russia.
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Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny jailed for two years and eight months – video
“Make no mistake, the Kremlin is not terribly afraid of protests,” she said.
A total of 1,438 people were arrested across the country, the OVD-Info monitor reported, with many sent to jails already overcrowded with protesters detained over the last two weeks.
In one case, protesters detained at a rally on Sunday released a video two days later saying they were being held by police in a bus in -11C temperatures because there was no space at a local jail for illegal immigrants that was being used to help process the thousands of detainees.
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“For the last nine hours we’ve been held in a bus where we’re being forced to remain standing,” one man said in a video posted to the internet. “We don’t have water. We aren’t taken to the toilets. There are dozens of other [buses] with detainees being held here as well.”
Peskov said that cases of excessive violence by police should be investigated, but also that the harsh measures employed by the police at the rallies were justified.
“There should be no unsanctioned protest activity,” he said. “Obviously, this kind of activity should be put a stop to quite firmly.”
Videos from the protests on Tuesday showed police beating unarmed protesters with their hands up and journalists, including a camera operator in a yellow press bib struck twice in the head by a helmeted riot police officer. Police said they had opened an investigation into the incident.
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