Moscow faces fresh sanctions threat for jailing Putin critic
LEADING Kremlin adversary Alexei Navalny, detained after flying back to Russia for the first time since being poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent, is spending his days under strict control in a VIP cell inside one of Moscow’s most infamous jails.
The prison, called Matrosskaya Tishina or Sailor’s Silence, occupies a block in Moscow’s north-east and has housed high-ranking prisoners the authorities wanted to cut off from the outside world since the Soviet era.
“I’d read about it (the prison) in books and now I’m here,” Mr Navalny quipped in an Instagram post.
The Kremlin has again dismissed calls from the West to release Mr Navalny.
The condemnations of his arrest and renewed calls from abroad for his release have added to the existing tensions between Russia and the West.
Some EU countries are suggesting more sanctions against Moscow.
But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that “we can’t and are not going to take these statements into account”.
“We are talking about a fact of noncompliance with the Russian law by a citizen of Russia,” he said.
“This is an absolutely internal matter and we will not allow anyone to interfere in it and do not intend to listen to such statements.”
Mr Navalny (44) was detained on Sunday evening at passport control at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport after arriving from Berlin, where he was treated following the poisoning in August.
On Monday, he was ordered to pre-trial detention for 30 days during a court hearing that was hastily set up in a police precinct where Mr Navalny was being held.
Russia’s prison service maintains that Mr Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure and anti-corruption campaigner, violated the probation terms of his suspended sentence on a 2014 money-laundering conviction, which was deemed “arbitrary” by the European Court of Human Rights.
Officials are seeking to send Mr Navalny to prison to serve the three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence.
He has interpreted the crackdown against him as a sign of Vladimir Putin’s fear.
Mr Peskov dismissed suggestions that Mr Putin was afraid of Mr Navalny as “nonsense” and insisted that he had violated the law.
The spokesman said the questions law enforcement had for Mr Navalny “have nothing whatsoever to do with the Russian president”.
Mr Navalny fell into a coma while aboard a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20 and was flown to a Berlin hospital two days later.
Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.
Russian authorities insisted the doctors who treated Mr Navalny in Siberia found no traces of poison and refused to start a criminal inquiry.
Last month, Mr Navalny released the recording of a phone call he said he made to a man who he alleged was a member of a group of officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) who purportedly poisoned him in August and then tried to cover it up.
The FSB has dismissed the recording as fake.
After Mr Navalny was jailed on Monday, his allies announced preparations for nationwide protests this Saturday and released a video of Mr Navalny urging people to not “be afraid” and “take to the streets”.
The Kremlin said it did not fear mass protests.
Mr Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption released a two-hour video investigation of what they called “Putin’s palace” – an estate on Russia’s Black Sea that they said cost $1.3bn (€1.1bn) and was allegedly funded through an elaborate corruption scheme involving Mr Putin’s inner circle.
‘I read about this prison in books and now I’m here’