Navalny was placed on the country’s federal wanted list last month for violating parole terms related to a 2014 fraud conviction, which he dismisses as politically motivated.
The Federal Prison Service of Russia (FSIN) has requested that a court replace its suspended sentence with a prison sentence. If the request is granted, Navalny will likely be jailed for 3.5 years.
On Monday morning, Navalny faced a surprise hearing in an improvised courtroom inside the police station that was considered by his supporters to be a “circus”.
The activist’s lawyers said they received a notice of the case just minutes before the start and did not have a chance to review any documents or speak to Navalny.
Navalny himself was escorted out of a cell moments later, under the impression that he would finally be able to find his defense team, but he found himself in the audience. In his first appearance since being arrested by border inspectors at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport last night, Navalny called the process “illegality at its highest point” and a “mockery of justice”.
“Some people are filming me, some people are sitting here, all of this is called a public hearing in the Khimki court. They are reviewing the question of whether I remain in custody. Why is the hearing taking place inside a police station? Why that no warning was given? I’ve seen many cases of mocking justice, but grandpa in the bunker is so scared that he destroyed the procedural codex, “said Navalny in a video posted to his Instagram account during the process.
His spokesman Kira Yarmysh noted that the only people who seemed to know about the hearing in advance were a state TV team and reporters from a pro-Kremlin tabloid, which prompted Navalny to request that “real journalists” be allowed in. About 200 journalists and supporters gathered in front of the police station where the hearing took place, according to the news agency Mediazona.
Navalny has been a perennial thorn in the side of Russian President Vladimir Putin, raising concerns for his security in the country.
The investigation also found that this unit, which included chemical weapons experts, had followed Navalny on more than 30 trips to and from Moscow since 2017. Russia denies involvement in Navalny’s poisoning. Putin himself said in December that if Russian security services wanted to kill Navalny, they “would have finished” the job.
However, several Western officials and Navalny himself openly blamed the Kremlin.
Governments around the world have criticized Russia for Navalny’s arrest. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, UK Foreign Minister Dominic Raab and German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas called for his immediate release the day before.
Pompeo said that “the United States strongly condemns Russia’s decision to arrest Aleksey” in a statement on Sunday. “We note with great concern that his arrest is the latest in a series of attempts to silence Navalny and other opposition figures and independent voices that criticize the Russian authorities.”
Raab called Navalny’s prison “terrible” and said the opposition leader was “the victim of a despicable crime” in a tweet on Monday. “Instead of pursuing Mr. Navalny, Russia should explain how a chemical weapon came to be used on Russian soil.”
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov avoided criticism, saying the West was trying to “divert attention” from its own problems.
“We saw yesterday how [the West] took advantage of the news about Navalny’s return to the Russian Federation. You can clearly feel the joy with which carbon copy comments are coming, “Lavrov said during his annual press conference on Monday.” With joy, because it seems to allow Western politicians to think that they will be able to divert attention from the deepest crisis in which the liberal model of development finds itself ”.
Russian authorities generally try to maintain the appearance of an impartial judicial system, but the optics and speed of processing Navalny’s case on Monday shocked his supporters.
“What is happening to Navalny is worse than a circus. What remote listening? [is] Are any Khimki police officers trying to keep a person in custody? This is pure hell. Will they shoot him in the end? ”Said Vladimir Voronin, a lawyer with the Anticorruption Foundation, in a tweet.
Symbolically, a portrait of Genrikh Yagoda, head of the Soviet Union’s NKVD secret service during the early years of Joseph Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, hung over Navalny in the courtroom on Monday, according to images posted online.