MOSCOW – Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny faced a rushed audience on Monday at a police station near the airport where he was arrested the night before, an extraordinary move by Russian authorities.
Navalny’s lawyer was notified on Monday afternoon that his client would receive, within minutes, a hearing to consider whether he would remain in prison. According to a letter posted online by the lawyer, Vadim Kobzev, the hearing would take place not in a court, but at the Khimki police station, the city outside Moscow where Navalny was being held.
Russia’s judicial system is not independent, but it generally aims to preserve the veneer of procedural impartiality in cases against opposition figures. On Monday, however, the authorities appeared to be doing everything possible to keep Navalny’s supporters out of balance, processing their case at breakneck speed.
Photos posted by Kobzev showed an improvised courtroom at the police station, with a simple table and a microphone placed in front of a bulletin board. A video posted on Mr. Navalny’s Telegram account showed a judge in a black robe sitting in front of the bulletin board. Navalny said he had been led into the room a minute before his prison cell.
“What is happening here is impossible,” said Navalny in the video. “This is the highest degree of illegality – I can’t call it anything else.”
Navalny, long one of President Vladimir V. Putin’s most prominent critics, passed out and fell into a coma in August, and was flown to Germany for treatment. Laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden determined that he had been poisoned by a military-grade nervous agent from the Novichok family, developed in the Soviet Union and Russia.
The opposition leader promised to return to Russia as soon as he recovered and last week announced his plans to fly to Moscow, despite the threat of arrest on arrival.
This is exactly what happened on Sunday night: after Mr. Navalny’s flight landed at Sheremetyevo airport, the police found him at passport control and took him into custody. He spent the night at Police Station No. 2 in Khimki, near the airport, and was denied access to your attorney. Kobzev was not allowed to enter the police station until Monday morning.
“It looks like grandpa in the bunker is so afraid of everything that he tore the criminal prosecution code demonstratively and threw it in the trash,” said Navalny, using one of his nicknames for Putin.
Most of the journalists gathered outside the police station were not allowed to enter, but at least three pro-Kremlin news outlets were allowed to enter through the back door.
“I demand that this procedure be as open as possible so that all media can see the incredible absurdity of what is happening here,” Navalny told the judge, according to the another video posted by your spokesperson.
While Navalny faced the judge inside, about 50 journalists and supporters remained in the freezing cold outside the barbed wire fence surrounding the police station, which is in a residential neighborhood of Soviet-era buildings.
A local district councilor for the Yabloko Liberal Party, Antonina B. Stetsenko, arrived with a poster echoing Putin’s dismissive words about Navalny: “Freedom for Aleksei Navalny, the patient at the Berlin clinic that no one needs.” Within minutes, the police told her to stay away.
“I believe it is my duty to support you,” said Stetsenko. “Nothing surprises me in this country anymore.”
Navalny was arrested minutes after arriving in Russia for the first time since August, when he was taken to Berlin in a coma. Russia’s prison service said he violated the terms of a six-year suspended sentence while recovering in Germany.
“What a huge constraint for the entire judicial system,” Ivan Zhdanov, director of Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, posted on Twitter. “This is just something incredible.”
Germany and European Union on Monday joined the international chorus calling for Navalny’s release. But Sergei V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, insisted that the Kremlin had no intention of changing course under pressure.
“Of course, we need to think about our image, but we are not a lady coming to a dance,” Lavrov said at his annual press conference, answering a question about what Navalny’s arrest meant for Russia on the international stage scene. “The Navalny case took on the meaning of artificial foreign policy and, I would say, totally unjustified.”
But the action to stop Navalny was seen across the world and by many Russians as a blatant attempt by Putin to suppress the popular discontent that is bubbling up in the country.
“The Russian authorities must release him immediately and guarantee his safety,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, in a statement. “The arrest of political opponents is against Russia’s international commitments.”
Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a Twitter post that Navalny’s arrest was “totally incomprehensible” and asked Russia to respect the rule of law. In the United States, both outgoing and incoming administrations have called for Navalny’s release, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo writing that “confident political leaders are not afraid of competing voices”.
Lavrov, however, said Western officials simply saw the case as a welcome distraction from their own problems.
“We are seeing how they heard yesterday’s news about Navalny’s return to Russia – you can really feel how happy they are talking about it,” said Lavrov. “They are happy because it allows Western politicians to think that they can thus divert attention from the global crisis in which the liberal model of development has ended.”