Russian police detained dozens of protesters in Moscow on Tuesday as a court weighed whether to jail Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny for several years in a case that has sparked nationwide protests and talk of new Western sanctions.
Navalny, the Kremlin's most prominent critic, was arrested on January 17 upon returning from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve-agent poisoning.
Moscow's state prison authority accuses the anti-corruption campaigner of parole violations while he was recovering in Germany from the near-fatal poisoning. It wants the court to convert a suspended sentence from a 2014 embezzlement conviction – which he rejected as politically motivated – into a real jail term of up to three and a half years.
Addressing the court, a visibly irritated Navalny insisted he had sent documentation to the prison service on his new location in Germany.
"What else could I do? Did you need me to send video of my physiotherapy?" he asked from a glass cell in the courtroom.
Outside the building, FRANCE 24's correspondent Theo Merz said riot police had shut down surrounding streets and detained dozens of protesters.
Reuters reporters saw police detain around 60 Navalny supporters, while the OVD-Info monitoring group reported 237 arrests.
Russia slams Western 'interference'
Navalny, 44, has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering his murder, something the Kremlin denies. It in turn has suggested that Navalny is an asset of America's Central Intelligence Agency, a charge he rejects.
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.
FRANCE 24's Merz said that the Russian opposition had gained in "momentum" with "tens of thousands of people on the streets of Moscow ... tens of thousands elsewhere".
"Mr Navalny’s team are certainly hoping that we're going to see protests again today", Merz said, adding that his team were also hoping for Navalny's release.
The jailing of Navalny and the crackdown on protests have stoked international outrage, with Western officials calling for his release and condemning the arrests of demonstrators. Russia has dismissed the comments as interfering in its domestic affairs.
On Tuesday, the Kremlin warned the European Union against linking bilateral ties to the Navalny case.
"We hope that such nonsense as linking the prospects of Russia-EU relations with the resident of a detention centre will not happen," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists, days ahead of a visit to Moscow by the EU's foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell.
(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS, AFP)
