Putin critic Navalny calls on supporters to protest jailing

Vladimir Putin’s best-known domestic critic has called on his supporters to take to the streets after a court ordered him jailed for 30 days.

Alexei Navalny is escorted out of a police station in Khimki, outside Moscow, on Monday night. Picture: AFP

Russia’s most prominent opposition leader Alexei Navalny has called on his supporters to take to the streets after a hastily organised court ordered him jailed for 30 days.

The makeshift court — set up in a police station on the outskirts of Moscow where Mr Navalny was being held — agreed late on Monday to a request from prosecutors for the dissident to be kept in custody until February 15.

Police then moved the Kremlin critic to Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison, infamous as the jail where lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in 2009 while being held under pre-trial arrest.

Mr Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s best-known domestic critic, was taken to the station after a dramatic airport arrest on Sunday that prompted condemnation from the West and calls for his immediate release.

In a video released by his team shortly after the ruling, the 44-year-old anti-corruption campaigner urged his supporters to protest. “Do not be silent. Resist. Take to the streets — not for me, but for you,” Mr Navalny said.

The head of Mr Navalny’s regional network Leonid Volkov said preparations were under way for protests to be organised across the country on Saturday.

Mr Navalny was arrested as he returned to Russia from Germany for the first time since he was poisoned with a nerve agent in August and flown to Berlin in an induced coma.

Russia’s FSIN prison service said that it had detained him for violating the terms of a suspended sentence he was given in 2014, on fraud charges he says were politically motivated. Mr Navalny’s lawyer Olga Mikhailova said outside the police station on Monday that a court hearing on turning that sentence into a prison term would take place on February 2.

In another video posted by his team from the courtroom before the Monday ruling, Mr Navalny said he did not understand how the session could be taking place.

“I’ve seen a lot of mockery of justice, but the old man in the bunker (Putin) is so afraid that they have blatantly torn up and thrown away” Russia’s criminal code, Mr Navalny said.

With temperatures hovering around -20C, several dozen Navalny supporters gathered outside the police station shouting “Freedom!” and “Let him go!” as police looked on. One waved a pair of underwear attached to a pole, a reference to claims that the novichok nerve agent used against Mr Navalny had been placed in a pair of his underpants.

Protesters also gathered in Saint Petersburg, where OVD Info, which monitors detentions at political protests in Russia, said at least 46 people were detained.

“It’s a disgrace. You can’t say what you think,” said 50-year-old protester Natalya Semyonova at the scene.

Mr Navalny emerged a decade ago with his Anti-Corruption Foundation publishing anti-graft investigations revealing the lavish lifestyles of the Russian elite. He has repeatedly led large-scale street protests against Mr Putin, most recently in 2019, and was gearing up for another challenge to authorities during elections to the lower house State Duma in September.

He was evacuated to Germany after falling violently ill on a flight over Siberia in August from what Western experts concluded was a poisoning with novichok, a Soviet era nerve agent. Mr Navalny accused Mr Putin of ordering the attack, a claim the Kremlin vehemently denies. Russian police have not opened an investigation, citing a lack of evidence.

Mr Navalny is also facing potential new criminal charges under a probe launched late last year by Russian investigators who say he misappropriated over $US4m worth of donations.

His arrest on Sunday drew widespread Western condemnation, with the US, EU and Canada all calling for his release.

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said it was “appalling”.

“He must be immediately released,” Mr Raab tweeted.

“Rather than persecuting Mr Navalny Russia should explain how a chemical weapon came to be used on Russian soil.”

Navalny was poisoned with the same chemical used in the attempted murder of former spy Sergei Skripal in the English town of Salisbury in 2018.

Russia has hit back at the condemnation, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday saying it was an attempt to distract attention from domestic problems in Western countries.

Russia frequently accuses the West of unfair criticism of its domestic policies, pointing to divisions in Western countries such as those that led to the storming of the US Capitol or the Yellow Vests protests in France.

AFP