A Moscow court has arrested a top ally of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but Lithuania has rejected a request to take him into custody.
MOSCOW – A Moscow court on Wednesday ordered the arrest of a top ally of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but Lithuania, where the associate lives, has directly rejected the request to take him into custody.
The action against Leonid Volkov by the Basmanny Court was seen as part of the authorities’ effort to quell demonstrations demanding the release of Navalny, a top enemy of the Kremlin who had been imprisoned since January 17.
Volkov, Navalny’s chief strategist, has been accused of encouraging minors to take part in unauthorized rallies, which could throw him in jail for up to three years. He had already been included on an international search list.
Volkov, who has been living abroad since 2019, has denied the allegations, and the Lithuanian government has refused to carry out a Russian court order.
“The use of international tools for politically motivated prosecution is a wrong practice,” said Lithuanian Interior Minister Agne Bilotaite.
“This raises serious doubts about Russia’s membership in these organizations,” she said, referring to Russia’s arrest warrant sent through Interpol.
Navalny, 44, an anti-corruption investigator, the most important critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was arrested on his return from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nervous breakdown he accuses Kremlin. The Russian authorities rejected the accusation.
Protests across Russia drew tens of thousands of people to the streets for two consecutive weekends in January, the biggest show of dissatisfaction in years. Several protests rocked Moscow and St. Petersburg after a Moscow court on February 2 sentenced Navalny to two years and eight months in prison for violating probation during his recovery in Germany.
This results from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Navalny rejected as fabricated and the European Court of Human Rights ruled that it was illegal. He described his new prison as “Putin’s personal revenge” for surviving and exposing the assassination plot.
Authorities responded to the protests with widespread repression, detaining about 11,000 people across Russia, many of whom were later fined or sentenced to between 7 and 15 days in prison. He also moved to isolate key members of Navalny’s team, putting several of his top associates under house arrest for two months without internet access.
In a change of strategy amid repression, Volkov said last week that pro-Navalny demonstrations should be interrupted until spring, arguing that trying to hold rallies every weekend would only lead to thousands more arrests and exhaust participants.
On Tuesday, however, he announced a new form of protest, urging city dwellers to briefly gather in residential yards on Sunday with their mobile phone flashlights on. He claimed that the new tactics – similar to those used by anti-government protesters in neighboring Belarus – would prevent Russian police from interfering and allowing more people to participate without fear of repression. The protests in Belarus followed the re-election in August of the country’s long-serving autocratic president, Alexander Lukashenko, in a poll widely considered rigged.
Navalny’s arrest and repression of protests have further fueled tensions between Russia and the West. The United States and the European Union have called on Russia to release Navalny, but the Kremlin has accused them of meddling in Russia’s internal affairs and warned that it will not listen to Western criticism of Navalny’s conviction and police actions against supporters. his.
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Associated Press writer Liudas Dapkus in Vilnius, Lithuania, contributed.