Russian prosecutors want Alexei Navalny behind bars

Moscow — Russian prosecutors demanded opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s imprisonment on the eve of a court hearing, after police detained record numbers of protesters demonstrating against President Vladimir Putin for a second straight weekend.

The prosecutor general’s office said on Monday it agreed with the federal penitentiary service that Navalny had repeatedly violated the conditions of a suspended 3.5-year sentence for fraud and should receive a real prison term in response, according to a website statement.

The call to jail Navalny at the hearing in Moscow scheduled for Tuesday raises the stakes in the confrontation between the Kremlin and the anti-Putin opposition after police detained at least 5,135 people in nationwide protests on Sunday, according to the OVD-Info monitoring group. The US and the EU have called on Russia to release Navalny, whose supporters plan more protests outside the court.

The opposition leader has been in detention since mid-January after he defied threats of arrest to return to Russia from Germany, where he’d been recovering from a nerve-agent attack that he and Western nations have blamed on Putin’s security service. The Kremlin denies responsibility.

Police detained protesters in at least 88 cities across Russia, including 1,653 in Moscow and 1,159 in St Petersburg, OVD-Info reported. Dozens of journalists were held, the group said.

The unsanctioned demonstrations followed January 23 protests when nearly 3,600 were detained as tens of thousands turned out in more than 150 cities despite freezing temperatures. Riot police were accused of using electric shock devices against some protesters this time amid complaints of a particularly harsh crackdown.

Most of the Navalny aides who weren’t already in prison were picked up before the protests and are now facing criminal charges. Authorities in Moscow had also sought to deter demonstrators by sealing off much of the centre of the capital to traffic and pedestrians.

The interior ministry said about 2,000 people participated in the unsanctioned protests in Moscow, the Interfax news service reported on Sunday.

As well as the threat of a jail term on Tuesday, Navalny also faces new potential fraud charges that could carry an additional 10-year punishment.

Putin has been in power for more than two decades, the longest rule since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. In July, he pushed through constitutional changes that would allow him to stay as president until 2036. His support dropped to a record low in 2020 amid the Covid-19 lockdown, but recovered a bit by November, according to the Levada Center.

While he’s survived several previous waves of anti-Kremlin protests, steadily tightening restrictions on public demonstrations, the opposition is digging in for a long-term struggle ahead of 2024, when Putin must decide whether to seek a fifth mandate.

Bloomberg