D-day for Kremlin critic Navalny as Russian court considers longer jail term

[February 02, 2021]  By Maria Tsvetkova and Tom Balmforth

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian court on Tuesday weighed whether to jail Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny for up to three and a half years in a case that has sparked nationwide protests and talk of new Western sanctions.

Navalny, one of President Vladimir Putin's most prominent critics, was arrested at the Russian border on Jan. 17 for alleged parole violations after returning from Germany where he had been recovering from a nerve agent poisoning in Russia.

Navalny accuses Putin of ordering his murder, which the Kremlin denies. It has suggested that Navalny is a CIA asset, a charge he rejects, and has told the West to stay out of its domestic affairs.

A serious jail term for Navalny would become a point of tension with the West, like the case of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, another Putin critic, who spent 10 years in prison after being arrested in 2003.

On the eve of the hearing, a close Navalny ally urged the West to hit Putin's inner circle with personal sanctions, predicting that could trigger potentially destabilising infighting among Russia's elite.

Navalny watched Tuesday's hearing from inside a glass cage in the courtroom. Before proceedings began, he praised Yulia, his wife, who was present after being fined the previous day for taking part in a protest to demand his release.

"They said that you had seriously violated public order and were a bad girl. I'm proud of you," Navalny said.

Outside, Reuters reporters saw riot police detain around 60 of his supporters who had gathered to offer their support. The OVD-Info monitoring group reported 237 arrests.

COURTROOM DUELLING

Moscow's state prison authority accuses Navalny of parole violations relating to a suspended sentence he had been serving in an embezzlement case he calls trumped up.

On Tuesday, it repeated its request for the court to convert that suspended sentence into a real jail term of up to three and a half years.

A prison service representative told the court that Navalny had violated public order many times since being handed the original suspended sentence and that he had systematically failed to report in to register.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, accused of flouting the terms of a suspended sentence for embezzlement, writes inside a defendant dock during a court hearing in Moscow, Russia February 2, 2021. Press service of Moscow City Court/Handout via REUTERS

Navalny says he was unable to report to the prison service at the end of last year because he was recovering in Germany from being poisoned. The prison service said its complaints pre-dated his poisoning and that Navalny had in any case been well enough to meet journalists after being discharged from a Berlin hospital in September.

Navalny, who is already serving a 30-day detention sentence in connection with the same case, told the court that the whole country knew he had been poisoned and was in Germany at the end of last year.

"On what grounds are you saying you didn't know where I was? You're misleading the court," he told the prison service official, who told Navalny he should have got in touch to formally inform the service of his circumstances.

Alexei Chesnakov, a political consultant close to the Kremlin, said on the Telegram messenger service:

"The question is not whether they will give him (a jail term) or not. They will. They will today. The question is how long for. And when they'll add more."

Navalny's supporters have staged two straight weekends of nationwide protests demanding he be freed, despite a massive show of police force, the threat of arrest, bitter cold and the pandemic.

While the trigger for the protests was Navalny's arrest, some protesters, young and old, say they have also taken to the streets to vent their frustration over declining living standards and the perceived gap between a small, wealthy elite and ordinary people.

(Additional reporting by Gleb Stolyarov, Polina Nikolskaya, Gabrielle Tetrault-Farber, Tom Balmforth and Anton Zverev; Writing by Tom Balmforth/Andrew Osborn; Editing by Giles Elgood)

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