MOSCOW (AP) – In a letter from prison, opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Thursday urged Russians to overcome their fears and free the country from a “bunch of thieves”, while the Kremlin executed thousands of protesters. after the unsanctioned rallies.
Navalny, who was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison earlier this week, said in a statement on his Instagram account that ‘iron doors slammed shut behind me with a deafening sound, but I feel like a free man. Because I feel confident that I’m right. Thanks for your support. Thanks to my family’s support. ”
Navalny, 44, an anti-corruption campaigner who is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most determined political enemy, was arrested on January 17 after returning from a five-month recovery in Germany from a nervous poisoning he suffered. owed to the Kremlin. Russian authorities deny any involvement, claiming they have no evidence that he was poisoned, despite tests by several European laboratories.
A Moscow court has sent Navalny to prison on Tuesday and found him violating the terms of his probation while recovering in Germany. The sentence stems from a 2014 conviction that Navalny rejected as fabricated and that the European Court of Human Rights found illegal.
He said his imprisonment was ‘Putin’s personal revenge’ for surviving and exposing the assassination.
“But even more, this is a message from Putin and his friends to the whole country: ‘Have you seen what we can do? We spit on laws and steamroller anyone who dares to challenge us. We are the law. ‘”
Protests against Navalny’s arrest and imprisonment have spread over Russia’s 11 time zones over the past two weekends, drawing tens of thousands of people into the greatest dissatisfaction with Putin’s rule in years.
According to an arrest monitoring group OVD-Info, the police arrested more than 10,000 protesters in Russia and had no response to the protest. Many detainees packed hours into police buses after detention facilities in Moscow and St. Petersburg quickly ran out of space. After a long wait, they were stuffed into overcrowded prison cells with no precautions to prevent them from becoming infected with the coronavirus.
Some of the detainees said that their cells did not have beds and that they had to sleep on the floor, while others complained that there were not enough beds and prisoners took turns taking an afternoon nap.
Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief strategist currently living abroad, said in a live YouTube broadcast that the protests should stand still until spring after they reach a peak. He said protesters had achieved a ‘huge moral victory’, arguing that the attempt to maintain rallies every weekend would only lead to thousands of arrests and wear out participants.
Instead, he called on supporters to challenge the Kremlin candidates in the September parliamentary elections and to secure new Western sanctions against Russia to push for the release of Navalny. He said Navalny’s team would try to make sure that “every world leader would discuss nothing but Navalny’s release with Putin.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday had a call with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who raised the issue of Navalny, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry. It said Lavrov stressed the need for respect for Russian law.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia did not want to listen to Western criticism of Navalny’s sentencing and police action against protesters. “We are not going to make such rulings about the application of our laws to those who violate them and take into account the rulings of the Russian court,” Peskov said.
He shrugged off questions about prisoners who had waited many hours on police buses and were crammed into cramped cells, saying they were to blame. ‘The situation was not provoked by law enforcement. It was provoked by participants in actions without approval, “Peskov said during a call with reporters.
One detainee, 30-year-old architect Almir Shamasov, who spent ten days in a detention facility in Sakharovo outside Moscow, said he spent 20 hours in a police van that was either flooded with fumes or cold shivering when the engine shut down. is.
‘When you sit inside a police van with engine and heat on, the smell of gas or diesel is unbearable. “When it’s off, the steam comes out of your mouth,” he said after being released late Wednesday.
Another detainee, Eva Sokolova, said after walking out of the Sakharovo detention center, she slept on the floor of a police station for two nights before the court sent her to jail for three days.
About 150 family members of the detainees waited many hours outside in the snow on Wednesday to hand over food and necessities. One of them, Tatiana Yastrebova, said she waited six hours for officials to accept items she had brought for her son.
After the arrest of Navalny, the authorities also quickly sat down to silence and isolate his allies. Last week, a Moscow court sentenced his brother, Oleg, the biggest collaborator Lyubov Sobol, and several others under house arrest – without internet access – for two months as part of a criminal investigation into alleged violations of coronavirus restrictions during protests. Sobol was formally charged on Thursday with inciting violations of sanitary regulations by arranging protests.
Navalny has another court hearing scheduled for Friday in Moscow on separate charges of defamation of a World War II veteran. He rejected the case because the Kremlin is taking political revenge.
Navalny argued that the suppression of protests was a sign of weakness and said that the power of the government had illusion and urged Russians not to fear it.
“They can only hold on to power and use it to enrich themselves by relying on our fear,” he said. ‘If we overcome the fear, we will be able to free our homeland from a bunch of resident thieves. And we will do it. We must do it for ourselves and future generations. ”
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Kostya Manenkov contributed to this report.