The Russian prison service said on Thursday that top Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny would be arrested immediately as soon as he returned from Germany.
Navalny, who was recovering in Germany after a nerve agent poisoning in August that he blamed on the Kremlin, said he would fly back home on Sunday. He accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of trying to stop him from coming home with the threat of arrest. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied a role in the poisoning of the opposition leader.
In late December, the Federal Penitentiary Service, or FSIN, warned Navalny that he should be jailed if he did not report to his office immediately, in accordance with the terms of a suspended sentence and probation he was serving. convicted in 2014 on charges. of embezzlement and money laundering which he rejected as politically motivated. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that his conviction was illegal.
The FSIN said in a statement on Thursday that it had issued an arrest warrant for Navalny in late December after failing to report to the office. The prison service, which asked a Moscow court to turn Navalny’s suspended sentence of 3 1/2 years into a real case, noted that it was’ obliged to take all necessary steps to keep Navalny in custody pending the court’s ruling. ‘
In a parallel move, just before New Year, Russia’s main investigative agency also opened a new criminal case against Navalny on charges of large-scale fraud related to its alleged misappropriation of $ 5 million in private donations to its Anti-Corruption Foundation and others. organizations. Navalny also dismissed the allegations as an unlawful fabrication.
Navalny, the most visible Putin critic who has received numerous short prison sentences in recent years, fell into a coma while on board a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20. He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a hospital in Berlin. dae later.
Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, found that he was exposed to a Soviet era of the Novichok nerve.
Russian authorities insisted that the doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia before he was transported to Germany found no traces of poison and challenged German officials to provide evidence of his poisoning. They refused to institute a full-fledged criminal investigation, citing the lack of evidence that Navalny was poisoned.
Last month, Navalny released the recording of a phone call he said he made to a man he described as a suspected member of a group of Federal Security Service officers, or FSBs, who allegedly August poisoned and then tried to cover. on.
The FSB dismissed the survey as false.