Agency vows swift arrest of Putin critic
Russia’s prison service said Thursday that top Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny faces immediate arrest once he arrives from Germany.
Navalny, who has been convalescing in Germany from an August poisoning with a nerve agent that he has blamed on the Kremlin, said he will fly back home 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 opposition leader’s poisoning.
At the end of December, the Federal Penitentiary Service warned Navalny that he faced time in prison if he fails to immediately report to its office in line with the terms of a suspended sentence and probation he received for a 2014 conviction on charges of embezzlement and money laundering that he rejected as politically motivated. The European Court for Human Rights had ruled that his conviction was unlawful.
The Federal Penitentiary Service said in a statement Thursday that it issued an arrest warrant for Navalny in late December after his failure to report to its office. The prison service, which has asked a Moscow court to turn Navalny’s 3½-year suspended sentence into a real one, noted that it’s “obliged to take all the necessary action to detain Navalny pending the court’s ruling.”
In a parallel move just before New Year’s, Russia’s main investigative agency also opened a new criminal case against Navalny on charges of large-scale fraud related to the alleged mishandling of $5 million in private donations to his Anti-Corruption Foundation and other organizations. Navalny also has dismissed those accusations as crudely fabricated.