The wife of the Kremlin’s poisoned critic Alexei Navalny was fined on Monday for joining the tens of thousands across Russia who protested her husband’s arrest.
Yulia Navalnaya was among more than 5,400 people detained on Sunday during sometimes violent demonstrations calling for the release of the 44-year-old opposition leader.
She was released several hours later, after being accused of participating in an unauthorized demonstration.
She appeared in court on Monday and was fined 20,000 rubles – about $ 265 – for violating protest regulations, her lawyer Svetlana Davydova told the Interfax news agency. The defense plans to appeal the decision.
Sunday was the second wave of mass protests against Navalny, who was arrested on January 17 when he returned to his homeland after five months in Germany recovering from near-fatal poisoning. The Kremlin critic insists that his poisoning was ordered by President Vladimir Putin.
The more than 5,400 detained on Sunday was the most that OVD-Info, a legal aid group that monitors prisons in protests, has seen in its nine years of record-keeping in the Putin era.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Monday dismissed tens of thousands of people who took to the streets, telling reporters that “there can be no conversation with hooligans and bullies”.
Navalny’s team already called for more protests on Tuesday, when he is due to appear in court on several charges of violating the terms of a 2014 suspended sentence for embezzlement.
He faces up to two and a half years in prison, with the Attorney General’s Office on Monday supporting a request from the prison service to change the suspended sentence to prison.
“This motion is considered legal and justified,” prosecutors said in a statement.
Authorities also asked a court on Monday to put Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, under house arrest until March 23. She is one of several opposition leader associates who have been arrested, many accused of violating COVID-19 security regulations by encouraging protests.
Putin has long denied being involved in the apparent assassination attempt, even suggesting that Navalny may have poisoned himself.
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