MOSCOW – Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who has been in Germany for months recovering from a nervous agent attack that Western officials say was carried out by the Russian state, said on Wednesday that he would return to Russia this weekend , despite the threat of being arrested on arrival.
Mr Navalny said in social media posts that he had bought a ticket for a flight to Moscow this Sunday. His announcement that he will return was made just two days after the Russian prison authority filed a petition with a court to arrest Navalny for violating the terms of a previous suspended prison sentence.
“They are doing everything they can to scare me,” said Navalny in an Instagram post on Wednesday, referring to Russian officials. “But I don’t really care what they are doing. Russia is my country, Moscow is my city and I miss them ”.
Navalny was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent in Siberia in August, in what he and Western officials say was an assassination attempt by the Russian government. He fell into a coma and was taken to Berlin for treatment.
He said on Wednesday that he now believes he is well enough to return to Russia. He said he plans to travel on the low-cost airline Pobeda and will arrive in Moscow on Sunday.
“Come and meet me!” he said.
A few days after emerging from a medically induced coma at Berlin’s Charité hospital in September, Navalny promised to return to Russia. But his surprise announcement on Wednesday about the timing of this return shook Russian policy – establishing a high-risk decision for the Kremlin on how to respond.
Last month, working with open source investigative organization Bellingcat, Navalny released two videos on YouTube documenting an elaborate plot by Russia’s domestic intelligence service, the FSB, to kill him. The videos have been viewed a total of 45 million times.
At the same time, the Kremlin increased pressure on Navalny, signaling that he would end up in prison if he returned to Russia. President Vladimir V. Putin described Navalny as a CIA resource and joked that if Russian agents wanted to kill the opposition leader, “they probably would have finished the job”.
But arresting the opposition leader would pose risks to the Kremlin because the move could lead to protests and, in announcing his imminent return, Navalny appears to be accusing Putin of the bluff. A Navalny ally, Lyubov Sobol, was arrested in Moscow for 48 hours in December, then released.
“The Kremlin has gone so far in its game of raising bets, dramatically raising expectations that Navalny will be arrested, that not arresting him will be seen by conservatives and security officials as a demonstration of weakness,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a non-academic. resident at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said in a post on Telegram. “They hoped he wouldn’t come back.”
Research shows that Navalny is Russia’s most prominent opposition figure – with an online audience in the tens of millions, far beyond the liberal strongholds of Moscow and St. Petersburg – and mass protests in Russia’s Far East and Moscow in the the past two years have highlighted the repressed discontent of society.
“I ended up in Germany, having arrived in an intensive care box, for a reason: they tried to kill me,” wrote Navalny on Instagram. “Putin, having ordered my death, is screaming in his bunker and ordering all his servants to do everything to prevent me from returning.”