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A Moscow court granted a request by prosecutors for Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny to serve a prison sentence for violating the terms of his probation.
Judge Natalya Repnikova ordered that a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence Navalny received in 2014 be changed on time in a penal colony, an AFP journalist said in court.
Judge Repnikova said the time Navalny previously spent under house arrest in sentencing will count as time served and, according to her team, that would mean at least two and a half years in prison now.
The Navalny Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK) immediately called on supporters to protest in central Moscow.
“We are going to the center of Moscow right now,” he wrote on Twitter, urging his followers to join them.
The 44-year-old anti-corruption activist was arrested on January 17 as he returned to Moscow from Germany, where he had spent months recovering from a nerve agent poisoning in August that he blames on President Vladimir Putin.
He was charged with violating the terms of his probation under the 2014 suspended sentence on fraud charges, because he failed to register with the prison service while in Germany.
The European Court of Human Rights in 2017 condemned the ruling in the fraud case as “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.”
During today’s hearing, Mr. Navalny said that the case was designed to “intimidate a large number of people.”
“They are putting one person behind bars to scare millions,” he said.
Navalny supporters have staged two consecutive weekends of protests across the country demanding his release, despite a massive show of police force, the threat of arrest, the freezing cold and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Navalny’s political allies asked his supporters to rally outside of court to support him, an action that authorities would consider an illegal protest.
Riot police were deployed in large numbers near the court before the hearing.
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