Russian officials have stepped up pressure on Alexei Navalny, a leading Kremlin critic, to file new charges against him.
Russia’s main investigative agency, the Investigative Committee, said on Tuesday it had opened a new criminal case against Naval on charges of large-scale fraud in connection with a દ 5 million fine in private donations to its anti-corruption foundation and other organizations.
Naval, who was forced into Germany after being poisoned in August with a nerve agent blaming the Kremlin, mocked the new allegations as a sign of Vladimir Putin’s movement.
“It looks like Putin is in a frenzy,” Navalny said of the Russian president on Twitter.
Naval fell ill on August 20 during a domestic flight to Russia and was brought into a coma for treatment in Berlin two days later, where he spent a week in intensive care. Tests conducted by the organization Prohibition the Chemical Weapons, an international organization based in Labs and The Hague in Germany, France and Sweden, established that they were exposed to Soviet-era Novichok nerve agents.
Navalny has accused Putin of ordering his poisoning. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied the allegations.
“They are trying to put me behind bars for failing to kill and for continuing to search for my killers and for proving to be behind Putin,” Navalny tweeted.
News of the investigation into Navalny came a day after he was accused by the country’s prison agency of violating the terms of his suspended sentence in a previous case and was given a day to report his office fees. In the decade since he began writing about official corruption in Russia and running for office, the 44-year-old Navalny has been repeatedly arrested and charged with various offenses.
The Federal Penitentiary Service pointed to an article by doctors at Berlin’s Charity Hospital, published in the medical journal The Lancet, indicating that the novel had fully recovered. He ordered Navalny to visit his office for the 2014 sentence, regardless of the terms of his three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence, or face a true prison sentence if he missed Tuesday’s deadline.
Navalny, who had previously said he plans to return to Russia once he is fully recovered, scoffed at the demand, citing an article in the Federal Penitentiary Service’s The Lancet acknowledging the government had been poisoned.
Russian officials have insisted that doctors did not detect the toxin before taking it to Germany for treatment in Navalny in Salbria and challenged German officials to provide evidence of their poisoning. They refused to launch a full criminal investigation, citing a lack of evidence that Navalny had been poisoned.
The European Union imposed sanctions on six Russian officials and the state research institute after it was tested by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that came against the novel’s Novichok. Russia has attacked EU officials with its own sanctions.
