Navalny urges Russians to take to streets over jailing

Moscow, Jan. 19: Russia’s most prominent opposition leader Alexei Navalny called on Monday for his supporters to take to the streets after a hastily organised court ordered him jailed for 30 days.

The makeshift court —set up in a police station on the outskirts of Moscow where Navalny was being held — agreed to a request from prosecutors for Navalny to be kept in custody until February 15.

Police then moved the Kremlin critic to Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison, infamous as the jail where lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in 2009 while being held under pretrial arrest.

Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s bestknown domestic critic, was taken to the station after a dramatic airport arrest on Sunday that prompted condemnation from the West and calls for his immediate release.

In a video released by his team shortly after the ruling, the 44-yearold anti-corruption campaigner urged his supporters to protest.

“Do not be silent. Resist. Take to the streets — not for me, but for you,” Navalny said. The head of Navalny’s regional network Leonid Volkov said preparations were underway for protests to be organised across the country on Saturday.

Navalny was arrested as he returned to Russia from Germany for the first time since he was poisoned with a nerve agent in August and flown to Berlin in an induced coma.

Russia’s FSIN prison service said that it had detained him for violating the terms of a suspended sentence he was given in 2014, on fraud charges he says were politically motivated.

Navalny’s lawyer Olga Mikhailova told reporters outside of the police station Monday that a court hearing on turning that sentence into a prison term will take place on February 2. In another video posted by his team from the courtroom before the Monday ruling, Navalny said he did not understand how the session could be taking place.

“I’ve seen a lot of mockery of justice, but the old man in the bunker (Putin) is so afraid that they have blatantly torn up and thrown away” Russia’s criminal code, Navalny said.

With temperatures hovering around -20 degrees Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit), several dozen Navalny supporters gathered outside the police station shouting “Freedom!” and “Let him go!” as police looked on.

One waved a pair of underwear attached to a pole, a reference to claims that the Novichok nerve agent used against Navalny had been placed in a pair of his underpants. —