Jail for Navalny, agency urges

Prison service says Putin critic breached suspended sentence

MOSCOW — Russia’s prison service has asked a Moscow court to put Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny behind bars for breaching the terms of his suspended sentence and probation.

Navalny, who is convalescing in Germany from an August poisoning with a nerve agent that he has blamed on the Kremlin, alleged Tuesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the new legal motion.

“Putin is so mad at me for surviving his poisoning that he ordered the Federal Penitentiary Service to replace my suspended sentence with a real one,” Navalny tweeted.

The Kremlin has denied a role in the opposition leader’s poisoning.

There was no comment from the Russian government on the appeal posted on the prison service’s website.

At the end of December, the Federal Penitentiary Service demanded that Navalny report to its office in line with the terms of a suspended sentence he received for a 2014 conviction on charges of embezzlement and money laundering that he rejected as politically motivated. The service warned that he faced prison time if he failed to appear.

Navalny said his suspended sentence ended on Dec. 30. He also noted the European Court for Human Rights had ruled that his 2014 conviction was unlawful.

Navalny fell into a coma while aboard a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on Aug. 20. He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a Berlin hospital two days later.

Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.

Russian authorities said that doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia before he was airlifted to Germany found no trace of poison.