MOSCOW (AP) – A Moscow court on Wednesday ordered the arrest of a senior ally of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but Lithuania, where the partner lives, bluntly rejected a request to arrest him.
The action against Leonid Volkov of the Basmanny district court was seen as part of an effort by the authorities to crush demonstrations demanding the release of Navalny, an enemy of the Kremlin who has been imprisoned since 17 January.
Volkov, a Navalny chief strategist, was accused of encouraging minors to participate in unauthorized rallies that could put him in jail for up to three years. He had already been included in an international search list.
Volkov, who has been living abroad since 2019, has turned down the charges and the Lithuanian government has refused to comply with the Russian court order.
“Using international tools for politically motivated processes is a wrong practice,” Lithuanian Interior Minister Agne Bilotaite said.
“This raises serious doubts about Russia’s membership in these organizations,” he said, referring to the Russian arrest warrant sent through Interpol.
Navalny, 44, an anti-corruption investigator who is the top critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was arrested on his return from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve agent poisoning that the Kremlin blames. Russian authorities have rejected the accusation.
Protests across Russia drew tens of thousands of people to the streets for two weekends in a row in January, the biggest show of discontent in recent years. Further protests shook Moscow and St. Petersburg after a Moscow court on February 2 sentenced Navalny to two years and eight months in prison for violating the terms of his parole while he was recovering in Germany.
This is due to a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Navalny has rejected for fabrication and which the European Court of Human Rights has declared illegal. He described his new imprisonment as “Putin’s personal revenge” for surviving and exposing the assassination plot.
Authorities responded to the protests with forceful repression, which detained approximately 11,000 people across Russia, many of whom were later fined or sentenced to prison terms ranging from 7 to 15 days. They have also moved to isolate key members of Navalny’s team, and have placed several of their top associates under house arrest for two months without internet access.
In a change of strategy amid repression, Volkov said last week that pro-Navalny demonstrations should be stopped until spring, arguing that an attempt to hold rallies every weekend would only result in thousands of arrests. more and would wear out participants.
On Tuesday, however, he announced a new form of protest, urging residents of large cities to briefly gather in residential courtyards on Sunday with cell phone lights on. He argued that the new tactics – similar to those used by anti-government protesters in neighboring Belarus – would prevent Russian riot police from interfering and allow more people to participate without fear of repression. Belarus protests followed the re-election in August of the country’s autocratic president, Alexander Lukashenko, for a long time, in votes considered calls.
The arrest of Navalny and the crackdown on protests have sparked even more tensions between Russia and the West. The United States and the European Union have urged Russia to release Navalny, but the Kremlin has accused them of meddling in Russia’s internal affairs and has warned that it will not listen to Western criticism of Navalny’s sentence and police actions against him. supporters.
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Associated Press writer Liudas Dapkus collaborated in Vilnius, Lithuania.