Alexej Navalny (44) faces a long prison sentence.
That will be decided on Tuesday in a Moscow court.
The Kremlin critic continues to be combative.
Moscow - A Moscow court will decide on Tuesday whether Kremlin critic
Alexei Navalny * has
to go to prison longer.
The Russian Prison Authority (FSIN) has applied for the conversion of an existing probation into a prison sentence because the 44-year-old
is said to have violated
probation
requirements.
This application is supported by the public prosecutor.
If he is granted, Navalny will have to
go to prison
for around
two and a half years,
according to his lawyer
.
Navalny: Parole violations
Navalny was
sentenced to three and a half years in prison in
2014 on
charges of embezzlement
, but the
sentence was
suspended.
The FSIN now wants to withdraw this probation and allow the prison sentence to apply.
Since Navalny has already served some of them under house arrest, he faces another two and a half years in prison.
The authorities had already justified the arrest of Navalny immediately after his return from Germany in mid-January with violations of probation conditions.
He was sentenced to 30 days' imprisonment in an urgent procedure, now it is about a significantly longer prison term.
The process has been criticized for being politically motivated - many experts see it as a new attempt to silence the opponent of Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin.
Navalny barely survived an assassination attempt involving the chemical warfare agent Novichok in August.
The 44-year-old blames Putin and agents of the Russian domestic secret service FSB for the attack.
They reject the allegations.
According to the doctors treating him, Alexei Navalny was
poisoned
with the
neurotoxin Novichok
.
This has already happened to several Kremlin critics.
An overview.
At the beginning of the week, Nawalny's team
published a highly acclaimed unveiling
video
entitled
“A Palace for Putin
”, which is supposed to prove that the president had a “tsarist empire” built on the Black Sea with bribes.
The
Kremlin describes the allegations as a "lie"
.
AFP, dpa * Merkur.de is part of the
Ippen digital network
