MOSCOW (AP) – In a prison note, opposition leader Alexei Navalny urged the Russians on Thursday to overcome their fear and “liberate” the country from a “band of thieves”, while the Kremlin launched the arrests of thousands of protesters as a due response to unsanctioned rallies.
Navalny, who was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison earlier this week, said in a statement posted on his Instagram account that “iron doors slammed into my back with a deafening sound, but I feel like a free man. Because I feel confident that I’m right. Thank you for your support. Thanks to the support of my family. “
Navalny, 44, an anti-corruption activist who is the most determined political opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was arrested on January 17 on his return from his five-month convalescence in Germany due to nervous agent poisoning, which he attributed to the Kremlin. The Russian authorities deny any involvement and say they have no evidence that he was poisoned, despite tests by several European laboratories.
On Tuesday, a Moscow court sent Navalny to prison, finding that he violated the terms of his probation while recovering in Germany. The sentence stems from a 2014 conviction for embezzlement that Navalny rejected as fabricated and the European Court of Human Rights found to be illegal.
He said his arrest was “Putin’s personal vendetta” for surviving and exposing the assassination plan.
“But more than that, it’s a message from Putin and his friends across the country: ‘Did you see what we can do? We spit on the laws and run over anyone who dares to challenge us. We are the law ‘”.
Protests against Navalny’s arrest and imprisonment have spread across Russia’s 11 time zones over the past two weekends, drawing tens of thousands into the biggest display of discontent with the Putin government in years.
In an unrestricted response to the protest, the police arrested more than 10,000 protest participants across Russia and exceeded the results, according to detention monitoring group OVD-Info. Many detainees spent hours huddled on police buses after detention facilities in Moscow and St. Petersburg quickly ran out of space. After a long wait, they were huddled in overcrowded cells, with no precaution to prevent them from being infected with the coronavirus.
Some of the detainees said their cells had no beds and had to sleep on the floor, while others complained that there were not enough beds and the inmates took turns to take a nap.
Speaking on a live broadcast on YouTube, Leonid Volkov, chief strategist at Navalny who is currently residing abroad, said the protests should stop until spring, after reaching the peak. He said the protesters won a “huge moral victory” and argued that trying to hold rallies each weekend would only lead to thousands of arrests and exhaust participants.
Instead, he urged his supporters to focus on challenging the Kremlin candidates in September’s parliamentary elections and securing new Western sanctions against Russia to press for Navalny’s release. He said Navalny’s team would try to ensure that “all world leaders do not discuss anything but Navalny’s release with Putin”.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had a phone call on Thursday with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who raised the issue of Navalny, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry. He said Lavrov emphasized the need to respect Russian law.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Russia would not listen to Western criticism of Navalny’s condemnation and police action against protesters. “We will not take into account such statements about the application of our laws to those who violate them and the verdicts of the Russian courts,” said Peskov.
He ignored questions about detainees who waited many hours on police buses and were squeezed into cramped cells, saying it was their fault. “The situation was not caused by the application of the law. It was provoked by participants in unsanctioned actions, ”said Peskov during a call with reporters.
One detainee, 30-year-old architect Almir Shamasov, who spent 10 days in a detention center in Sakharovo outside Moscow, said he spent 20 hours in a police van that was flooded with smoke or shivering when the engine has been turned off.
“When you sit in a police van with the engine and heater running, the smell of gasoline or diesel is unbearable. When it’s off, the steam comes out of your mouth, ”he said after being released on Wednesday night.
Another detainee, Eva Sokolova, said after leaving the prison in Sakharovo that she slept two nights on the floor of a police station before the court arrested her for three days.
About 150 relatives of the detainees waited outside in the snow for many hours on Wednesday to deliver food and other necessities. One of them, Tatiana Yastrebova, said she waited six hours for authorities to accept some items she brought to her son.
After Navalny’s arrest, the authorities also acted quickly to silence and isolate their allies. Last week, a Moscow court placed his brother, Oleg, principal associate Lyubov Sobol and several others under house arrest – with no internet access – for two months as part of a criminal investigation into alleged violations of coronavirus restrictions during the protests. . Sobol was formally accused on Thursday of inciting violations of health regulations by organizing protests.
Navalny has another hearing scheduled for Friday in Moscow, on separate charges of slandering a World War II veteran. He dismissed the case as the Kremlin enacting political revenge.
Navalny argued that the crackdown on the protests was a sign of weakness, saying the government’s power is illusory and urging the Russians not to fear it.
“They can only maintain power and use it to enrich themselves by counting on our fear,” he said. “If we overcome this fear, we will be able to free our country from a band of thieves of occupants. And let’s do that. We must do this for ourselves and for future generations. “
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Kostya Manenkov contributed to this report.