MOSCOW – Alexei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who has been in Germany for months and has recovered from a nerve agent attack carried out by Russian officials on Western officials, said on Wednesday that he would return to Russia over the weekend despite being jailed. arrival.
Mr Navalny said in social media posts that he bought a ticket for a flight to Moscow this Sunday. His announcement that he would return comes just two days after the Russian prison authorities requested a court to arrest Mr. To put Navalny in jail for violating the terms of an earlier prison sentence.
“They are doing everything they can to scare me,” he said. Navalny said in an Instagram message on Wednesday referring to the Russian authorities. “But I do not care much what they do. Russia is my country, Moscow is my city, and I miss them. ”
Mr. Navalny was poisoned in August by a military nerve agent in Siberia in what he and Western officials said was an assassination attempt by the Russian government. He fell into a coma and was flown to Berlin for treatment.
He said on Wednesday he now believes he is good enough to return to Russia. He said he planned to travel with the cheap airline Pobeda and that he would arrive in Moscow on Sunday.
“Come meet me!” he said.
Within days of recovering from a medically induced coma at Charité Hospital in Berlin in September, Mr. Navalny promises to return to Russia. But his surprise announcement Wednesday about the timing of the return shocked Russian politics and prompted a decisive decision for the Kremlin on how to respond.
Last month, in collaboration with the open source investigative organization Bellingcat, Mr. Navalny released two YouTube videos documenting an extensive conspiracy by the Russian domestic intelligence service, the FSB, to assassinate him. The videos were viewed a total of 45 million times.
At the same time, the Kremlin put pressure on Mr. Navalny increased and indicated that he would end up in jail if he returned to Russia. President Vladimir V. Putin called Mr. Navalny described it as a CIA asset, saying that if Russian agents wanted to kill the opposition leader, “they would probably have done the job.”
But the imprisonment of the opposition leader poses risks to the Kremlin because the protest could provoke protests, and by announcing his impending return, it appears that Mr. Navalny the bluff of mr. Putin mentions. An ally of Mr. Navalny, Lyubov Sobol, was jailed for 48 hours in Moscow in December and subsequently released.
“The Kremlin has gone so far in its game to raise interests, and the expectations that Navalny will be arrested, and that the Conservatives and security officials will not arrest him as a sign of weakness,” Tatiana Stanovaya said. a foreign scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said in a report on Telegram. “They expected him not to return.”
Polls show that Mr. Navalny Russia’s most prominent opposition figure is – with an online audience in the tens of thousands, far beyond the liberal strongholds of Moscow and St. Petersburg – and mass protests in the Far East of Russia and in Moscow over the past two years. underlined society’s pent-up dissatisfaction.
“I ended up in Germany, for one reason in an intensive care unit: they tried to kill me,” he said. Navalny wrote on Instagram. “Putin, after ordering me to be killed, shouts in his bunker and orders all his servants to do everything possible to stop me from returning.”