MOSCOW – Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s main opposition leader, appeared in court on Tuesday during a trial that could send him to jail for the first time in a remote penal colony.
The Russian authorities have indicated that they will not be affected by public pressure. Navalny, the 44-year-old anti-corruption activist, did not release. They have placed several of his leading allies under house arrest, and on Sunday they deployed a large police force in cities across Russia to suppress protests over the past few weeks to demand his freedom.
“Hundreds of thousands cannot be locked up,” he said. Navalny said during the trial. “I really hope that more and more people will realize this. And if they recognize it – and that moment will come – it will all fall apart, because you can not lock up the whole country. ‘
In anticipation of further protests on Tuesday, a fierce presence of riot police officers in armor, camouflage and black helmets cordoned off the Moscow area around the courthouse. Officers stood in front of entrances to the nearest subway station and checked people’s documents, and parking lots around the station were filled with reinforced police vans. According to the activist group OVD-Info, the police detained at least 237 people.
The court weighs the accusation of the prosecutor that Mr. Navalny violated the parole on a suspended three-and-a-half-year prison sentence he received in 2014. He and his brother were convicted of stealing about $ 500,000 from two companies, a conviction that the European Court of Human Rights called ‘arbitrary and apparently unreasonable’.
Mr Navalny and his allies, along with many independent analysts, see his persecution as an attempt by President Vladimir V. Putin to silence his harshest critic.
According to the previous sentence, the authorities say that Mr. Navalny had to report to the prison authorities at least twice a month. However, prosecutors have accused him of repeatedly failing to do so last year, including after he was released from a Berlin hospital in September when he recovered from an assassination attempt by poisoning.
At the end of the trial, Mr. Navalny gave a fiery speech in the courtroom in which he Putin blames the attempt to lock him out. He said the Russian president was angry that Mr. Navalny survived after being poisoned by military nerve agent Novichok in August, in what he and Western officials described as a state assassination attempt.
Mr. Navalny accused the Russian intelligence agency of harassing him on the orders of Mr. Putin tried to kill by applying Novichok to the underwear of the opposition leader. The Kremlin has denied involvement in the poisoning.
“His biggest resentment against me is that he will go up in history as a poisoner,” he said. Navalny about mr. Putin said. ‘There was Alexander the liberator and Yaroslav the wise. Now we will have Vladimir, the poisoner of underwear. ‘
Mr Navalny’s aides said only street protests could force the Kremlin to change course, and tens of thousands of people have been killed each year in cities across Russia for the past two weekends. Navalny gathered.
Early in the trial, Mr. Navalny – limited to a glass case for defendants, as is typical in Russia – regularly smiled and retained his sense of humor. When the judge, Natalia Repnikova, asked him to introduce himself, he replied, “Your honor, you forgot to introduce yourself.”
Then Mrs. Asking for his current address, Repnikova made a preliminary inquiry: ‘Preliminary detention no. 1 ‘
During an interruption in the process, Mr. Navalny, in a pair of pants and a dark hoodie, walked back and forth in his box. At one point he looked up at the depiction of the French philosopher Montesquieu and other bodies on the wall of the great courtroom with wooden panels.
The prosecutor has three and a half years in prison for Mr. Navalny asked, minus the amount of time he spent under house arrest, related to the case, which was about a year. The prosecutor, Yekaterina Frolova, said Mr. Navalny is guilty of “systematic breaches of the obligations imposed on him by the court.”
Mr. Navalny repeatedly met with Mrs. Frolova spat and called her “an honorable daughter of the regime”, but then added: “You are lying in every word.” He said he was being prosecuted for scaring millions of other Russians against Mr. Putin to stand up.
The choreography of the trial appears to be the proper process to Mr. To award Navalny. Officials have moved the trial from a courtroom outside Moscow to a larger case in the city – to be able to attend more journalists, they said.
Two sculpted judicial scales flanked the Russian double-headed eagle above the clothed judge. Repnikova, the judge, peppered the prosecutor with sharp questions and investigated the arguments. Mr Navalny was allowed to deliver his fiery speech and criticize the judge and prosecutor, with few interruptions. But journalists were banned from filming the proceedings or taking photos.
The prosecutor’s case to Mr. Sending Navalny to prison was largely based on technical things. A prison service officer, Aleksandr Yermolin, read aloud from a stack of papers in which Mr. Navalny’s alleged parole violations were set out. The prosecutor said the offenses started before the poisoning of Mr. Navalny in August last year.
At one point, Mr. Yermolin quoted online reports showing that Mr. Navalny moved freely through Germany while not reporting for his parole last year. At another point, prosecutor Yekaterina Frolova responded to an argument made by Navalny’s lawyers by addressing the day of the week on which the accused contacted the parole authorities.
“Jan. ‘9 was a Thursday, which has nothing to do with a Monday,’ the prosecutor said.
Mr. Navalny and his attorneys, in a long back-and-forth with the prosecution, insisted that they have properly notified parole officials of his inability to report in person due to his poisoning. Mr. Navalny noted that even Mr. Putin publicly referred to the treatment of Mr. Navalny in Germany.
“Say, dear comrade captain, do you respect the President of Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin?” Mr Navalny asked the prison officer, Mr Yermolin.
As he reached for the glass in front of him, Mr. Navalny added: “On what grounds do you say you did not know about my location?”
Mr. Navalny was confined to house arrest for much of 2014 and served repeated prison sentences of several weeks at a time. Until now, however, he has never served a long prison sentence.
According to analysts, the Kremlin’s calculation has long been that Mr. Navalny could be more of a liability behind bars – as Russia’s main political prisoner – than to run free as an often controversial opposition activist.
It seems that thinking has changed as the Russian public’s frustration over Mr. Putin has increased, along with Mr. Navalny’s prestige.
After his poisoning, Mr. Navalny was transported in a coma to Berlin, where he recovered. He returned to Moscow last month, although Russian authorities made it clear that he would face years in prison.
He was sent to jail on his arrival, after which his team received a report from Mr. Navalny revealed what described an alleged secret palace that for Mr. Putin was built. The report has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube, sparked pro-Navalny protests and highlighted the ability of the opposition leader to reach a large audience on Russia’s mostly free internet.
But Putin seems ready to survive the uproar over his treatment of Mr. Navalny. There were no signs of support for the protesters in the government, parliament, big business or the security services, all of whom in Mr. Putin’s grip remains.
Gaps within the elite, nowhere to be seen in Russia, were crucial in the success of street movements in other former Soviet states.
The Kremlin on Tuesday tried again to understand the significance of the case of Mr. Navalny to a minimum, with a veiled warning to European Union official Josep Borrell Fontelles, who plans to visit Moscow this week.
“We hope there will be nothing as stupid as linking the future of Russian-European relations to the case of these detainees before the trial,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry S. Peskov said. the Tass State News Agency said.
Ivan Nechepurenko contribution made.