MOSCOW – A day after protests swept Russia in support of an imprisoned opposition leader, officials said on Monday that some participants face severe punishments, including spells in the prison system formerly known as the gulag.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov told reporters on a conference call on Monday that the protests included “a large number of hooligans and bullies” and that “the law must be enforced with the greatest severity”.
For the second consecutive weekend, tens of thousands of people came to cities across Russia on Sunday to call for the release of Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition leader who was jailed for 30 days last month after returning to Russia.
Navalny returned after his recovery in a German hospital after being poisoned in August by a military-grade nerve agent, an attack that has been confirmed by German, French and Swedish laboratories.
Navalny, 44, an anti-corruption activist who has participated in street protests in Russia for a decade, said the Kremlin is behind the poisoning and wants to kill him. The Russian government denied and questioned whether Navalny was really poisoned.
The near-fatal dose of poison, a sophisticated nerve agent called Novichok developed by the Soviet Union, was placed in Navalny’s underwear, according to the opposition leader, citing what he said was a confession recorded by a Russian agent.
Mr. Navalny returned to Russia, although the authorities threatened to arrest him on arrival. He was then arrested for violating probation in a 2014 financial crime conviction that the European Court of Human Rights found to be politically motivated.
Navalny said the financial crime was hatched by the Russian authorities and considered the charges of parole violation to be absurd, since he could not report twice a month to a parole officer because he was evacuated from Russia to Germany while he was in eat after the attack of the nervous agent.
He is on remand for 30 days. On Tuesday, a court will consider imposing a prison sentence that could put him behind bars for several years.
The attorney general’s office issued a statement on Monday saying Navalny should be jailed for parole violations, almost guaranteeing this result, as judges challenge prosecutors’ requests on only a small number of instances in the criminal justice system. from Russia.
Politically, the arrest would indicate a change in the government of President Vladimir V. Putin as he is dealing with Navalny. For years, he was frequently jailed for short terms on minor charges, but never arrested.
The incarceration of political dissidents ceased mainly in the immediate post-Soviet period, but was revived, on a small scale, under the Putin government.
After the street protests in Moscow in 2012, the courts sentenced tens of thousands of protesters to long prison terms, apparently as an example to others.
These few dozen cases were well publicized to highlight the illegality of unsanctioned street actions, but the approach avoided angering a large number of Moscow families in a prosecution attack, risking a spiral of repression and protest. In contrast, in neighboring Belarus, the police have detained at least hundreds of anti-government protesters since last summer for long periods.
During Sunday’s protest, police detained 5,300 people across Russia, although many were released later in the day.
It is unclear the extent of the network that prosecutors will now launch. Several dozen cases have been reported that can lead to spells in prison.
Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, referred to people who behaved “more or less aggressively” with the police in demanding severe punishments. “There can be no conversations with hooligans and bullies,” he said.
Supporters of Navalny said in a statement published online on Monday that they hope that prosecutors will justify the riot charges against the protesters based on two incidents: a police car that caught fire and a man on an empty street who entered a street. row of policemen holding club. The police issued a statement saying it was investigating the car fire as vandalism.
The statement noted that the two episodes were featured in the pro-government media and could become a justification for prosecuting marchers on riot charges, which carry lengthy sentences. Short sentences in Russia are served in prisons, while most of the longer sentences are served in penal colonies.