Russia’s prison service said on Thursday that top Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny should be arrested immediately after his return from Germany.
Navalny, who was recovering in Germany after an August poisoning with a nervous agent he blamed on the Kremlin, said he would fly back home on Sunday. He accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of now trying to discourage him from coming home with the threat of arrest. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied a role in poisoning the opposition leader.
In late December, the Federal Penitentiary Service, or FSIN, warned Navalny that he would face imprisonment if he did not immediately report to his office under the terms of a suspended sentence and probation he received for a conviction. since 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.
FSIN said in a statement on Thursday that it had issued an arrest warrant for Navalny in late December after failing to report to his office. The penitentiary service, which asked a Moscow court to turn Navalny’s 3-and-a-half-year suspended sentence into a real one, said he was “obliged to take all necessary measures to detain Navalny pending a court decision.”
In a parallel move just before the New Year, Russia’s main investigative agency opened a new criminal case against Navalny on charges of widespread fraud related to his alleged mishandling of $ 5 million in private donations to his Foundation. anti-corruption and other organizations. Navalny also dismissed the allegations as rude.
Navalny, Putin’s most visible critic, who has received numerous short sentences in recent years, fell into a coma while aboard a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20th. He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a hospital in Berlin two. days later.
Laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden, as well as tests carried out by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, have established that he was exposed to a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.
Russian authorities have insisted that doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia before he was flown to Germany found no signs of poison and challenged German officials to provide evidence of his poisoning. They refused to open a full-fledged criminal investigation, citing a lack of evidence that Navalny had been poisoned.
Last month, Navalny launched a phone call he said he addressed to a man he described as an alleged member of a group of Federal Security Service or FSB officers, who poisoned him in August and then tried to cover it up.
The FSB rejected the registration as false.