Russia’s prison service said on Thursday that the Kremlin’s top critic, Alexei Navalny, should be arrested immediately once he returns from Germany.
Navalny, who has been convalescing in Germany for an August poisoning with a nervous agent who has blamed the Kremlin, said he will return home on Sunday. He accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of trying to dissuade him from returning home with the threat of arrest. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied a role in the intoxication of the opposition leader.
In late December, the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), or FSIN, warned Navalny that he was in prison if he did not immediately report to his office in accordance with the terms of a suspended sentence and parole he received. for a 2014 conviction for charges. of embezzlement and money laundering which he rejected for political motivation. The European Court of Human Rights had ruled that his conviction was illegal.
The FSIN said on Thursday in a statement that it issued an arrest warrant for Navalny in late December after he failed to report to his office. The prison service, which has asked a Moscow court to turn Navalny’s 3-and-a-half-year suspended sentence into real, has noted that it is “obliged to take all necessary measures to detain Navalny pending a verdict.” of the court “.
In a parallel move just before New Year’s Eve, Russia’s main investigative agency also opened a new criminal case against Navalny accused of large-scale fraud related to his alleged handling of $ 5 million in private donations. to its Anti-Corruption Foundation and other organizations. Navalny has also dismissed these allegations as fabricated crudes.
Navalny, Putin’s most visible critic who had received numerous briefings in recent years, fell into a coma while aboard a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20th. He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a hospital in Berlin. days after.
Laboratories in Germany, France, and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to a Novichok nerve agent from the Soviet era.
Russian authorities have insisted that doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia before transferring him to Germany found no trace of poison and have challenged German officials to provide evidence of his poisoning. They refused to open a full-fledged criminal investigation, alleging a lack of evidence indicating that Navalny was poisoned.
Last month, Navalny posted 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 (FSB) agents, who allegedly poisoned in August and then tried to cover it. up.
The FSB dismissed the recording as false.