MOSCOW (AP) – Opposition leader Alexei Navalny urged Russians to overcome their fears and “liberate” the country from “a bunch of thieves” on Thursday, while the Kremlin arrested the arrests of thousands of people. protesters in response to unsanctioned rallies.
Navalny, who was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison earlier this week, said in a statement posted on his Instagram account that “the iron doors slammed behind me with a deafening sound, but I I feel like a free man. Because I feel confident I’m right. Thank you for your support. Thank you for supporting my family. ”
Navalny, 44, an anti-corruption activist, the staunchest political enemy of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was arrested on January 17 on his return from a five-month convalescence in Germany after a nervous breakdown. who blamed the Kremlin. Russian authorities deny any involvement and say they have no evidence that he was poisoned despite tests by several European laboratories.
A Moscow court sent Navalny to prison on Tuesday, finding that he had violated probation while recovering in Germany. The sentence comes from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Navalny rejected as fabricated, and the European Court of Human Rights ruled illegal.
He said his prison was “Putin’s personal revenge” for surviving and exposing the assassination plot.
“But even more so, it is a message from Putin and his friends to the whole country: ‘Have you seen what we can do? We spit out the laws and make anyone who dares to challenge us. We are the law. ‘”
Protests against Navalny’s arrest and imprisonment have spread across Russia’s 11 time zones in the past two weeks, drawing tens of thousands in the largest show of dissatisfaction with Putin’s government in recent years.
In a banned response to the protest, police arrested more than 10,000 protesters across Russia and beat scores, according to the OVD-Info arrest monitoring group. Many detainees spent hours in police buses after detention facilities in Moscow and St. Petersburg quickly ran out of space. After a long wait, they were crammed into overcrowded prison cells, with no precautions to prevent them from being infected with the coronavirus.
Some of the detainees said that their cells had no beds and that they had to sleep on the floor, while others complained that there were not enough beds and the detainees arranged to take a nap.
Speaking on a live show on YouTube, Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief strategist, who is currently abroad, said the protests should be interrupted until spring, after they peaked. He said the protesters had won a “huge moral victory” and claimed that trying to hold rallies every weekend would only lead to thousands more arrests and exhaust the participants.
Instead, he urged supporters to focus on challenging Kremlin candidates in the September parliamentary elections and securing new Western sanctions against Russia to push for Navalny’s release. He said Navalny’s team would try to ensure that “every world leader will discuss nothing but the release of Navalny with Putin.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had a phone call on Thursday with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who raised the Navalny issue, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry. He said Lavrov stressed the need to comply with Russian law.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia would not listen to Western criticism of Navalny’s conviction and police action against protesters. “We will not consider such statements regarding the application of our laws on those who violate them and the verdicts of the Russian court,” Peskov said.
He raised questions about detainees who wait many hours on police buses and are crammed into cramped cells saying they themselves are to blame. “The situation was not caused by law enforcement. It was provoked by participants in unsanctioned actions “, Peskov said during a call with reporters.
One detainee, 30-year-old architect Almir Shamasov, who spent 10 days in a Sakharovo detention facility outside Moscow, said he spent 20 hours in a police van, either was flooded with steam, or shivered when the engine was stopped.
“When you sit in a police van with the engine and the heat on, the smell of gas or diesel is unbearable. When it is stopped, the steam comes out of your mouth “, he said after being released late on Wednesday.
Another detainee, Eva Sokolova, said after she was released from detention in Sakharovo that she slept for two nights on the floor of a police station before the court closed it for three days.
About 150 relatives of the detainees waited many hours on the snow outside on Wednesday to hand over food and basic necessities. One of them, Tatiana Yastrebova, said she waited six hours for officials to accept some items she brought for her son.
After Navalny’s arrest, the authorities moved quickly to silence and isolate his allies. Last week, a Moscow court sentenced his brother, Oleg, chief associate Lyubov Sobol, and several others to house arrest – without internet access – for two months as part of a criminal investigation into alleged violations of the restrictions. coronavirus during protests. Sobol was officially accused on Thursday of inciting violations of health regulations by organizing protests.
Navalny is scheduled for another court hearing in Moscow on Friday on separate charges of defaming a World War II veteran. He dismissed the case while the Kremlin adopts political revenge.
Navalny said the crackdown on protests was a sign of weakness, saying the government’s power was illusory and urged Russians not to be afraid of it.
“They can only hold power and use it to get rich based on our fear,” he said. “If we overcome that fear, we will be able to free our country from a bunch of thief-occupiers. And we will. We must do it for ourselves and for future generations. ”
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Kostya Manenkov contributed to this report.