The Russian prison service said on Thursday that the Kremlin’s main critic, Alexei Navalny, could be arrested immediately after returning from Germany.
Navalny, who is convalescing in Germany from poisoning in August with a nervous agent he attributed to the Kremlin, said he would fly home on Sunday. He accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of trying to prevent him from returning home with the threat of arrest. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied a role in the poisoning of the opposition leader.
In late December, the Federal Prison Service, or FSIN, warned Navalny that he would face a prison sentence if he did not report immediately to his office in accordance with the terms of a suspended sentence and probation he received for a 2014 conviction. embezzlement and money laundering which he rejected as politically motivated. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that his conviction was illegal.
The FSIN said in a statement on Thursday that it issued an arrest warrant for Navalny in late December after his failure to report to the office. The prison service, which asked a Moscow court to turn Navalny’s 3 1/2 year suspended sentence into a royal sentence, noted that it is “obliged to take all necessary steps to arrest Navalny pending the court’s decision. “.
In a parallel move just before the New Year, Russia’s leading investigative agency also opened a new criminal case against Navalny on charges of large-scale fraud related to his alleged mishandling of $ 5 million in private donations to his Anti-Corruption Foundation and other organizations. Navalny also rejected these accusations, considering them crude.
Navalny, the best-known Putin critic who has received several brief prison sentences in recent years, fell into a coma on board a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20. He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a hospital in Berlin two days later.
Laboratories 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 insisted that doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia before he was flown to Germany found no trace of poison and challenged German authorities to provide evidence of his poisoning. They refused to open a full criminal investigation, citing a lack of evidence that Navalny was poisoned.
Last month, Navalny released the recording of a phone call he said he made to a man he described as an alleged member of a group of Federal Security Service officers, or FSB, who allegedly poisoned him in August and then tried to cover . above.
The FSB considered the recording to be false.