IN THE WORLD TODAY

Three and a half years for Navalny

AMOSCOW court has ordered Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to prison on charges that he violated the terms of his probation while he was recuperating in Germany from nerve-agent poisoning.

Navalny, who is the most prominent critic of Vladimir Putin, had earlier denounced the proceedings as a vain attempt by the Kremlin to scare millions of Russians into submission.

The prison sentence stems from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that he has rejected as fabricated.

The Russian penitentiary service asked the court to turn his threeand-a-half year suspended sentence into one served in prison, although he has spent some of that sentence under house arrest.

Navalny emphasised that the ECHR has ruled that his 2014 conviction was unlawful and Russia paid him compensation in line with the ruling.

As the order was read, Navalny pointed to his wife Yulia in the courtroom and traced the outline of a heart on the glass cage where he was being held.

Earlier, Navalny attributed his arrest to Putin’s “fear and hatred” saying the Russian leader will go down in history as a “poisoner”.

He said: “I have deeply offended him simply by surviving the assassination attempt that he ordered. The aim of that hearing is to scare a great number of people.

You can’t jail the entire country ... You have stolen people’s future and you are now trying to scare them.”

Navalny’s team called for another demonstration outside the Moscow courthouse, but police were out in force.

More than 320 people were detained, according to the group that monitors arrests.