A Moscow hearing rejected calls to release Alexei Navalny from prison, as investigators charged Navalny’s top assistants in a series of investigations intended to disrupt the protest movement that has emerged in support of the Kremlin critic.
Navalny will remain in prison until a parole hearing next week, where he could be sent to a penal colony for up to three and a half years. He was arrested on his return to Russia this month after a suspected attempted poisoning by the FSB that forced him to fight for his life.
The Kremlin appears poised to give the opposition leader a long jail term, despite protests in his support and a wave of international convictions against his arrest. Joe Biden raised the matter during his first phone call as US president with Vladimir Putin, and other leaders have spoken out on the matter as well.
Russian investigators also continued to target Navalny’s aides before further protests were scheduled for this Sunday. On Thursday, Leonid Volkov, a Navalny adviser, was charged with endangering underage Russians after shooting a video calling on young Russians to come to last week’s protests.
Volkov, who is in Latvia, said the allegations were false and were intended to divert attention from the protests against Putin. “Have you lost your mind, idiots?” he tweeted with the Russian Commission of Inquiry after it announced the allegations.
Young people are an increasing part of Navalny’s support as the opposition leader uses social media to share the findings of his investigation into Putin’s allies. A recent video about a £ 1 billion Black Sea palace allegedly built for Putin has over 98.5 million views on YouTube.
Navalny’s brother Oleg, his attorney Lyubov Sobol and a number of other top employees were carried away in raids last night and are being held on charges that last week’s protests violated coronavirus restrictions on public events. The charge carries a maximum sentence of three years. Oleg previously served a three and a half year sentence that Navalny described at the time as a “hostage situation.”
Navalny took part in the appeal hearing via video link from Matrosskaya Tishina prison in Moscow over a mandatory 14-day coronavirus quarantine after his arrival.
He seemed surprised to find that his brother and others had been arrested for last week’s protests. “But why did they arrest Oleg?” he said. He called his arrest “demonstrative lawlessness.”
“Right now you have the power,” he told a judge during the hearing. “You can put one guard on one side of me, the other on the other and keep me in handcuffs. But that situation will not last forever. “