MOSCOW – Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, appeared in court on Tuesday in a hearing that could land him a long jail term in a remote penal colony for the first time.
The Russian authorities have indicated that they will not be affected by public pressure to release Mr. Navalny, the 44-year-old anti-corruption activist. They placed several of his closest allies under house arrest, and on Sunday they deployed a massive police force in cities across Russia to quell the protests in recent weeks calling for his freedom.
“Hundreds of thousands cannot be imprisoned,” Navalny said at the hearing. “I really hope that more and more people will recognize this. And when they recognize this – and that moment will come – this will all fall apart, because you can’t lock up the whole country. “
In anticipation of more protests on Tuesday, a heavy presence of riot police in body armor, camouflage and black helmets cordoned off the Moscow neighborhood around the courthouse. Officers stood at the entrances to the nearest metro station checking people’s documents, and the parking lots around the station were full of police vans with reinforcements. According to the activist group OVD-Info, the police have arrested at least 237 people.
The court weighed in on the prosecution’s charge that Mr. Navalny violated parole on the basis of a three and a half year suspended sentence he was given in 2014. He and his brother were convicted of stealing about $ 500,000 from two companies, a conviction that the European Court of Human Rights called “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable”.
Mr. Navalny and his allies, along with many independent analysts, see his prosecution as an attempt by President Vladimir V. Putin to silence his loudest critic.
Under the terms of that earlier sentence, authorities say Mr Navalny should check in with the prison authorities at least twice a month. But prosecutors accuse him of failing to do so repeatedly last year, including after he was released from a Berlin hospital in September while recovering from a poisoning attack.
Towards the end of the hearing, Mr Navalny made a fiery speech in court blaming Mr Putin for trying to imprison him. He said the Russian president was upset that Mr Navalny had survived after being poisoned with military-grade nerve agent Novichok in August, in what he and Western officials have described as an assassination attempt on the state.
Navalny has accused Russia’s domestic intelligence agency of attempting to murder him on Mr. Putin’s orders by putting Novichok on the opposition leader’s underwear. The Kremlin has denied involvement in the poisoning.
“His biggest grudge against me now is that he will go down in history as a poison mixer,” Navalny said of Mr Putin. There was Alexander the Liberator and Yaroslav the Wise. Now we have Vladimir the Underpants Poison Mixer. “
Mr Navalny’s staff have said that only street protests can force the Kremlin to change course, and tens of thousands of people have gathered in cities in Russia for Mr Navalny each of the last two weekends.
At the beginning of the hearing, Mr Navalny – confined to a glass box for defendants, as is typical in Russia – often smiled and retained his sense of humor. When the judge, Natalia Repnikova, asked him to introduce himself, he replied, “Your Honor, you forgot to introduce yourself.”
When Mrs. Repnikova asked for his current address, he waited: “Detention No. 1”.
During a break in the proceedings, Mr. Navalny, in pants and a dark hoodie, walked back and forth in his box. At one point he looked up at the image of the French philosopher Montesquieu and other celebrities on the wood paneling of the main courtroom.
The prosecution called for Mr Navalny to be jailed for three and a half years, minus the time he spent under house arrest in connection with the case, which was about a year. The prosecutor, Yekaterina Frolova, said Mr Navalny was guilty of “systematic violations of the obligations imposed on him by the court”.
Navalny sparred repeatedly with Mrs. Frolova, calling her “an honorable daughter of the regime,” but then added, “You lie in every word.” He said he was being prosecuted for scaring millions of other Russians to revolt against Putin.
The choreography of the hearing seemed intended to show a fair trial bestowed on Mr. Navalny. Officials have moved the hearing from a courtroom outside Moscow to a larger one in the city – to allow more journalists to attend, they said.
Two carved judicial scales flanked the Russian double-headed eagle above the robed judge. Mrs. Repnikova, the judge, harassed the prosecution with sharp questions and examined her arguments. Mr. Navalny was allowed to deliver his fiery speech and without interruption to criticize the judge and the prosecution. But journalists were not allowed to film or take photos of the procedure.
The prosecution’s case to send Mr. Navalny to prison relied heavily on technicalities. A prison official, Aleksandr Yermolin, read in a low voice from a pile of papers about the alleged violations of Mr. Navalny’s parole. The prosecution said the violations had begun before Navalny’s poisoning last August.
At one point, Mr. Yermolin online reports showing that Mr. Navalny moved freely through Germany while not reporting last year for his parole. On another point, the prosecutor, Yekaterina Frolova, responded to an argument made by Mr Navalny’s lawyers by questioning the day of the week on which the defendant contacted the contingent authorities.
“Jan. 9 was a Thursday, which has nothing to do with a Monday, ”said the public prosecutor.
Mr. Navalny and his attorneys, in a lengthy back-and-forth with the Prosecution, insisted that they had properly informed the contingent officers of his inability to report personally because of his poisoning. Mr Navalny noted that even Mr Putin had publicly referred to Mr Navalny’s treatment in Germany last year.
“Hey, dear Comrade Captain, do you respect the President of Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin?” Mr. Navalny asked the prison official, Mr. Yermolin.
Poking the glass in front of him, Mr. Navalny added, “On what grounds did you know you didn’t know my location?”
Navalny was under house arrest for much of 2014 and was repeatedly in prison for several weeks at a time. However, until now he has never served a long prison sentence.
Analysts say the Kremlin’s calculus has long held that Navalny could be more of a debt behind bars – as Russia’s most prominent political prisoner – than running free as an often controversial opposition activist.
That thinking seems to have changed as the frustration of the Russian public about Mr Putin has grown, along with Mr Navalny’s notoriety.
After his poisoning, Mr. Navalny was transported in a coma to Berlin by airlift, where he recovered. He returned to Moscow last month, even though the Russian authorities made it clear that he would face years in prison.
He was imprisoned upon arrival, after which his team released a report from Mr. Navalny describing an alleged secret palace built for Mr. Putin. The report has been viewed over 100 million times on YouTube, fueling the pro-Navalny protests and underscoring the opposition leader’s ability to reach large audiences on Russia’s largely free internet.
But Mr. Putin seems poised to survive the uproar over his treatment of Mr. Navalny. There is no sign of support for the protesters within the government, parliament, the corporate sector or the security forces, all of which remain firmly within Putin’s reach.
Splits within the elite, at least nowhere on the surface in Russia, have been crucial to the success of street movements in other former Soviet states.
The Kremlin tried again on Tuesday to downplay the importance of Mr Navalny’s case by issuing a covert warning to the top European Union foreign policy official, Josep Borrell Fontelles, who plans to visit Moscow this week.
“We hope there will be no such foolish thing as connecting the future of Russian-European relations with the case of this resident of the temporary detention center,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov, according to the state news agency Tass. .
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.