Opposition activist Alexei Navalny seen outside Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court in December 2019.
Mikhail Tereshchenko | TASS | Getty Images
A Russian court has jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny for three and a half years for parole violations, charges Navalny and his team say are trumped up and politically motivated.
Moscow’s prison service requested on Monday that a court hand Navalny a jail term of up to three and a half years, Reuters reported. The prosecutor general’s office said the request was legal and justified, and that state prosecutors would ask a court to grant the prison service’s request.
Navalny, a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is already serving a 30-day prison term for parole violations following his arrest on Jan. 17. He had returned to Russia from Germany, where he had been treated for a nerve agent poisoning that took place last August.
The opposition leader has accused Putin of ordering the Novichok (a military-grade nerve agent) poisoning, but Putin and the Kremlin have denied any involvement.
Since Navalny’s return to Russia, and his immediate detention, demonstrations have broken out across the country over the last two weekends, with thousands protesting against Navalny’s treatment and demanding his release, as well as railing against corruption and kleptocracy.
The protests have led to violent police crackdowns and thousands of detentions and fines, including of Navalny’s wife.
European and U.S. officials have also called for Navalny’s immediate release, but so far have stopped short of punishing Russia. The country is already operating under Western sanctions for its 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and a 2018 nerve agent attack in the U.K. Despite evidence to the contrary, Russia denies involvement in the latter two events.
In late January, the EU said it would hold off from imposing fresh sanctions if Navalny was released.
By noon Tuesday, police had detained almost 100 people who had gathered outside the court while it considered the prison term, the OVD-Info protest monitoring group said. Reuters said its own reporters saw riot police detain around 60 of Navalny’s supporters.
Navalny watched Tuesday’s legal proceedings from inside a glass cage in the court. He praised his wife Yulia, Reuters reported, who was fined the previous day for taking part in a protest.
“They said that you had seriously violated public order and were a bad girl. I’m proud of you,” Navalny said, the news agency reported.
