MOSCOW (AP) – In a prison note, opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Thursday urged Russians to overcome fear and “liberate” the country from a “group of thieves” as the Kremlin went launching the arrests of thousands of protesters in response to unapproved 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 “the iron doors slammed into his back with a deafening sound , but I feel like a free man. Because I have confidence that I am right. Thanks for your support. Thanks for the support of my family. “
Navalny, 44, a defender of the fight against corruption, a staunchest political enemy of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was arrested on January 17 on his return from his five-month convalescence in Germany for nerve poisoning. he blamed the Kremlin. Russian authorities deny any involvement and say they have no evidence that he was poisoned despite tests by several European laboratories.
A Moscow court sent Navalny to prison on Tuesday, finding that he violated the conditions of his parole while recovering in Germany. The sentence is due to a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Navalny has dismissed as fabricated and which the European Court of Human Rights has declared illegal.
He said his imprisonment was Putin’s “personal revenge” for surviving and exposing the assassination plot.
“But even more, it’s a message from Putin and his friends across the country:‘ See what we can do? We spit on the laws and use anyone who dares to challenge us. We are the law. “
Protests against Navalny’s arrest and imprisonment have spread across Russia’s eleven time zones over the past two weekends, drawing tens of thousands in the biggest show of discontent with Putin’s government in the last years.
In an unrestricted response to the protest, police arrested more than 10,000 participants across Russia and beat several scores, according to detention control group OVD-Info. Many detainees spent hours packed into police buses after Moscow and St. Petersburg detention facilities quickly ran out of space. After a long wait, they were crammed into crowded prison cells without precautions to prevent them from becoming 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 a nap again.
In a live YouTube broadcast, Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief strategist currently residing abroad, said the protests should be stopped until spring after reaching the maximum. He said the protesters got a “huge moral victory” and argued that trying to hold rallies every weekend would only lead to thousands more arrests and wear out participants.
Instead, he urged supporters to focus on challenging Kremlin candidates in the September parliamentary elections and securing new Western sanctions against Russia for pushing for Navalny’s release. He said Navalny’s team would try to make sure that “all world leaders would discuss nothing more than Navalny’s release with Putin.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday called with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who raised the Navalny issue, 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 sentence and police action against protesters. “We will not take into account these statements about the application of our laws on those who violate them and Russian judicial verdicts,” Peskov said.
He set aside questions about detainees who had been waiting for hours on police buses and who were pushed into reduced cells saying they were to blame. “The situation was not caused by law enforcement. It was provoked by participants in unapproved actions, “Peskov said during a call to reporters.
A detainee, architect Almir Shamasov, 30, who spent ten days in a Sakharovo detention center on the outskirts of Moscow, said he spent 20 hours in a smoke-flooded police van or that it was shivering from the cold when the engine was cut off.
“When you sit in a police van with the engine and the heat on, the smell of gasoline or diesel is unbearable. When it goes out, the steam comes out of your mouth, ”he said after being released late Wednesday.
Another detainee, Eva Sokolova, said after she was released from custody in Sakharovo that she slept two nights on the floor of a police station before the court jailed her for three days.
Some 150 relatives of the detainees waited many hours out of the snow on Wednesday to deliver food and basic necessities. One of them, Tatiana Yastrebova, said she waited six hours for officials to accept some items she brought for her son.
After Navalny’s arrest, the authorities also quickly went on to silence and isolate their allies. Last week, a Moscow court placed his brother, Oleg, senior associate Lyubov Sobol, and several others under house arrest (without Internet access) for two months, as part of a criminal investigation into alleged violations of coronavirus restrictions during protests. Sobol was formally charged Thursday with inciting health regulations violations by organizing protests.
Navalny is scheduled for another court hearing on Friday in Moscow on separate charges of slandering a World War II veteran. He rejected the case when the Kremlin took political revenge.
Navalny argued that the crackdown on protests was a demonstration of weakness, saying government power is exciting and urging Russians not to fear it.
“They can only cling to power and use it to enrich themselves by trusting in our fear,” he said. “If we overcome this fear, we will be able to free our country from a lot of occupying thieves. And we will. We have to do it for ourselves and for future generations. “
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Kostya Manenkov contributed to this report.