Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny walks with protesters during a rally in Moscow, Russia on Saturday, February 29, 2019. The rally has marked five years since the murder of politician Boris Nemtsov.
Andrey Rudakov | Bloomberg via Getty Images
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was arrested at a Moscow airport after returning from Germany on Sunday, the prison service said.
The prison service said he was arrested for multiple violations of probation and the terms of a suspended sentence and will be held in custody until a court makes a decision on his case.
Navalny, who is President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent and determined enemy, spent the previous five months in Germany recovering from a nervous agent attack he attributed to the Kremlin. Navalny decided to leave Berlin on his own accord and was not under apparent pressure to leave Germany.
The prison service made the announcement after the flight that carried Navalny to land in the Russian capital, although at an airport different from the one scheduled. It was a possible attempt to deceive journalists and supporters who wanted to witness Navalny’s return.
Russia’s prison service last week issued an arrest warrant, saying it violated the terms of the suspended sentence it received in a 2014 conviction for embezzlement. The prison service has asked a Moscow court to turn Navalny’s suspended sentence of 3 ½ years into a real sentence.
After boarding the Moscow flight to Berlin on Sunday, Navalny said of the prospect of imprisonment: “It is impossible; I am an innocent man.”
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied a role in the poisoning of the opposition leader.
Navalny supporters and journalists arrived at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, where the plane was supposed to land, but ended up landing at Sheremetyevo airport, some 40 kilometers away. There was no immediate explanation for the flight deviation.
The OVD-Info group, which monitors political prisons, said at least 37 people were arrested at Vnukovo airport, although their affiliations were not immediately clear.
Vnukovo banned journalists from working inside the terminal, saying in a statement last week that the move was due to epidemiological concerns. The airport has also blocked access to the international arrivals area.
Police prisoner detention vehicles stopped outside the terminal on Sunday.
Independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and opposition social media reported on Sunday that several Navalny supporters in St. Petersburg were removed from trains to Moscow or prevented from boarding flights on Saturday night and early Sunday, including their team coordinator for the second largest city region.
Navalny fell into a coma on a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20. He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a hospital in Berlin two days later.
Laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.
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, alleging a lack of evidence that Navalny was poisoned.
Last month, Navalny released the recording of a phone call he said he made to a man he described as an alleged member of a group of Federal Security Service officers, or FSB, who allegedly poisoned him in August and then tried to cover . above. The FSB considered the recording to be false.
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