Navalny prosecutors seek three-and-a-halfyear jail term
Russian state prosecutors are poised to jail the opposition leader Alexei Navalny for three-and-a-half years, with the Kremlin shrugging off US complaints about his case on Monday ahead of a crucial court hearing on Tuesday.
Navalny – who was jailed after flying back to Moscow last month – faces the prospect of a lengthy spell behind bars. Vladimir Putin’s press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Moscow would ignore statements from the Biden administration, following Sunday’s mass pro-Navalny protests.
After demonstrators took to the streets in 90 towns and cities across the country riot police responded with a major show of force. They made a record number of arrests, detaining 5,300 people, including Navalny’s wife, Yulia, who was seized in north-east Moscow.
The Kremlin’s apparent strategy is to tough out growing street protests, which are likely to continue on Tuesday when Navalny appears in court. Moscow’s prison service has demanded a three-and-a-half year sentence for alleged parole violations.
Navalny says the charges are fake and politically motivated. He is accused of failing to meet his parole officer while he was in Germany recovering from novichok poisoning. Navalny alleges Putin authorised a bungled FSB spy agency operation last August to kill him in Siberia.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has condemned Moscow’s heavy-handed tactics against peaceful protesters and journalists and has called for Navalny to be set free. “We are deeply disturbed by this violent crackdown against people exercising their rights to protest peacefully against their government,” he said.
Blinken said frustration with official corruption and growing autocracy had driven popular protests: “I think they [Kremlin officials] need to look inward, not outward … Mr Navalny is giving expression to the voices of millions and millions of Russians. And that’s what this is about.”
The White House was reviewing whether to impose further sanctions in the wake of Moscow’s “deeply disturbing” actions, Blinken said. These included the recent SolarWinds cyberhack on US federal institutions, and claims Russia was offering bounty payments to Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.
Speaking on Monday, Peskov warned against fresh sanctions. “We are not prepared to accept or heed American statements about this,” he said. He described the pro-Navalny protests as illegal. “There can be no conversation with hooligans and provocateurs, the law should be applied with the utmost severity,” he told reporters.
Navalny’s allies have released a list of Putin-linked oligarchs and officials and called on the west to sanction them. So far, however, neither Boris Johnson nor Joe Biden have taken action. Biden and Putin spoke by phone last week for the first time since the president’s inauguration.
Navalny, 44, is serving a 30-day stint in jail. His wife appeared at Shcherbinsky court in Moscow on Monday and was fined 20,000 roubles (£192) for taking part in what the authorities say was an unsanctioned protest. Her lawyer, Svetlana Davydova, said she would appeal.
Moscow’s detention centres are overflowing, with 1,800 people arrested in the capital last weekend, Novaya Gazeta reported on Monday. Some protesters have been kept for days in police wagons, with others transferred to a detention centre for migrants, the paper said.
Pavel Chikov, a lawyer and rights advocate, said police had opened 40 criminal cases in 18 different regions related to the two weekends of rallies. Navalny has called on his supporters to gather outside the Moscow court during his hearing on Tuesday, which the authorities are certain to characterise as an illegal protest.