The Russian prison service said Thursday that the Kremlin’s top critic Alexei Navalny will be arrested immediately upon his return from Germany.
Navalny, who is recovering in Germany from August poisoning with a nerve gas he has blamed on the Kremlin, said he will fly home on Sunday. He accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of now trying to deter him from returning home with the threat of arrest. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied a role in the poisoning of the opposition leader.
In late December, the Federal Penitentiary Service, or FSIN, warned Navalny that he would face time in prison if he did not report immediately to his office in accordance with the terms of a suspended sentence and probation he had been given for a conviction in 2014 of embezzlement and money laundering which he rejected as politically motivated. The European Court of Human Rights had ruled his conviction unlawful.
The FSIN said in a statement on Thursday that it had issued an arrest warrant against Navalny in late December after he failed to report to his office. The Prison Service, which has asked a Moscow court to convert Navalny’s 3 1/2 year suspended sentence into a real one, noted that it is “mandatory to take all necessary steps to detain Navalny pending the trial. court decision. “
In a parallel move, just before New Year, Russia’s main investigative body also opened a new criminal case against Navalny on charges of large-scale fraud related to his alleged mishandling of $ 5 million in private donations to his Anti-Corruption Foundation and other organizations. Navalny has also dismissed those allegations as being gross.
Navalny, the most visible Putin critic who had received numerous short prison sentences in recent years, fell into a coma aboard a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20. He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a hospital in Berlin. days later.
Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, showed he was exposed to a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.
Russian authorities insisted that the doctors treating Navalny in Siberia before he was flown to Germany found no trace of poison and challenged German officials to provide evidence of his poisoning. They declined to open a full criminal investigation, citing the lack of evidence that Navalny had been poisoned.
Last month, Navalny released the recording of a phone call he made to a man he described as an alleged member of a group of Federal Security Service, or FSB officers, who supposedly poisoned him in August and then tried to hide it. up.
The FSB dismissed the recording as a fake.