Russian authorities have increased pressure on Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s prominent critic, by making new charges of fraud against him.
The Investigative Committee, Russia’s leading investigative agency, said on Tuesday that it had 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, who is recovering in Germany after poisoning in August with a nervous agent he attributed to the Kremlin, ridiculed the new charges as a sign of Vladimir Putin’s unrest.
“It looks like Putin is hysterical,” said Navalny of the Russian president on Twitter.
Navalny fell ill on August 20 during a domestic flight in Russia and two days later he was taken in a coma for treatment to Berlin, where he spent weeks in the ICU. Laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an intergovernmental body based in The Hague, established that he was exposed to a novichok nerve agent from the Soviet era.
Navalny accused Putin of ordering his poisoning. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied the charge.
“They are trying to put me behind bars for not having died and for continuing to hunt my killers and for proving that Putin was behind it,” tweeted Navalny.
News of the investigation involving Navalny came a day after the country’s prison agency accused him of violating the conditions of his suspended sentence in a previous case and gave him a day to report to his office. In the decade since he started writing about official corruption in Russia and ran for political office, Navalny, 44, has been arrested several times and faced several charges.
The Federal Prison Service pointed to an article by doctors at Berlin’s Charite hospital, published in the medical magazine The Lancet, indicating that Navalny has fully recovered. He ordered Navalny to visit his office under the terms of a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence he received for a 2014 conviction or face a real prison sentence if he misses Tuesday.
Navalny, who said earlier that he planned to return to Russia as soon as he fully recovered, scoffed at the demand, saying that the Federal Prison Service’s reference to the Lancet article prompted the government to accept that he was poisoned.
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.
The EU imposed sanctions on six Russian officials and a state research institute after tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons concluded that Navalny had been exposed to the novichok. Russia responded with its own sanctions against EU officials.