An appeal hearing in Moscow has rejected calls to release Alexei Navalny from prison as investigators charged Navalny’s leading aides in a series of investigations into the Kremlin’s protest movement. critic, disrupted.
Navalny will remain in jail until next week, a trial for which he could be sent to a penal colony for three and a half years. He was arrested after returning to Russia this month after a suspected FSB poisoning attempt that left him fighting for his life.
The Kremlin appears ready to give the opposition leader a lengthy prison sentence, despite protests in his support and a wave of international condemnation of his arrest. Joe Biden raised the issue during his first telephone conversation with US President Vladimir Putin, and other leaders spoke out on the issue.
Russian investigators also continued to target Navalny’s associates before further protests planned for this Sunday. On Thursday, Navalny’s adviser Leonid Volkov is accused of endangering underage Russians after recording a video asking young Russians to come to last week’s protests.
Volkov, who is in Latvia, said the charges were false and intended to divert attention from the protests against Putin. “Did you go absolutely crazy, idiots?” he tweeted at the Russian investigative committee after announcing the charges.
Young people are a growing part of Navalny’s support because of the opposition leader’s use of social media to share the findings of his investigation into Putin’s allies. A recent video about a £ 1 billion Black Sea Palace allegedly built for Putin has more than 98.5 million views on YouTube.
Navalny’s brother Oleg, his lawyer Lyubov Sobol and a number of other top assistants were whipped into raids last night and are being held on charges that the protests last week violated coronavirus restrictions on public events. The charges have a maximum sentence of three years. Oleg had previously served a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence that Navalny described at the time as a “hostage situation.”
Navalny participated in the appeal hearing through a video link from the Matrosskaya Tishina prison in Moscow due to a mandatory 14-day coronavirus quarantine upon his arrival.
He appeared surprised when he found out that his brother and others had been arrested for the protests last week. “But why did they arrest Oleg?” he said. He calls his arrest ‘demonstrative lawlessness’.
“Right now you have the power,” he told a judge during the trial. ‘You can put one guard on one side of me, one on the other side and hold me in handcuffs. But the situation is not going to last forever. ”