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MOSCOW, February 20: A Moscow appeals court on Saturday confirmed a prison sentence handed down to the Kremlin’s top critic Alexei Navalny after he returned to Russia from Germany last month.
Judge Dmitry Balashov rejected Navalny’s appeal of the Feb. 2 ruling, which converted a 2014 suspended sentence on embezzlement charges into actual jail time.
The judge decided to count six weeks that Navalny was under house arrest as part of the time served, so he will now be incarcerated for just over two and a half years in a penal colony.
Navalny, a 44-year-old anti-corruption activist who has become President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent opponent, was arrested in January when he returned to Russia after months in Germany recovering from a nerve agent poisoning that blames the Kremlin.
He was arrested for violating the probation conditions of the 2014 suspended sentence and later converted to a prison sentence.
Navalny and his supporters say the rulings and various other cases against him are a pretext to silence his corruption and stifle his political ambitions.
He was due to appear in court again on Saturday in another trial in which he is charged with defamation for calling a World War II veteran a “traitor” after he appeared in a pro-Kremlin video.
Prosecutors have asked that Navalny be fined the equivalent of $ 13,000 in that case. They also want his 2014 sentence to be converted into an actual jail sentence because the alleged defamation occurred while he was serving his suspended sentence. AFP
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