Kremlin tries to minimize Navalny’s imprisonment as thousands of arrests | World news

The Kremlin has tried to downplay the imprisonment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, saying his 32-month imprisonment will not “have a significant influence” on Russian politics or lead to a mass protest movement similar to that of neighboring Belarus.

As protesters detained at recent rallies in support of Navalny complained of inhumane conditions and beatings as police held them in overcrowded prisons or on buses in sub-zero temperatures, a Kremlin spokesman said Vladimir Putin had been too busy to follow the case and had not reacted to Navalny. speech in the courtroom on the day of his sentencing, when Navalny said the Russian president would make history as “Vladimir Putin, the underwear poisoner.”

“I don’t think that the convict you mentioned can speak about the place that Putin will occupy in history”, declared Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson. “Absolutely not. It’s up to the people of the country to say so.”

Navalny’s hearing came to a dramatic conclusion Tuesday night as the opposition leader was jailed for allegedly violating his parole in an earlier case, becoming Russia’s most important political prisoner.

His wife, who said goodbye to her husband Tuesday night in court, broke her silence on the case on Wednesday. “You write to me that I am strong. I am not strong, I am normal, ”she said in an Instagram post to her supporters. “I have read your posts and understand that there are so many good, strong and correct people supporting Alexei and me that we should not back down or be afraid. We will win.”

Peskov addressed Tuesday’s protests against the Navalny ruling, defending a brutal crackdown by armored, baton-wielding riot police that has led to more than 1,150 arrests in Moscow alone.

Videos of Tuesday’s protests showed police beating unarmed protesters with their hands in the air and journalists, including a cameraman in a yellow bib hit twice on the head by a helmeted riot police officer. Police say they have opened an investigation into the incident.

Peskov said that cases of excessive violence by the police should be investigated, but also that the harsh measures employed by the police at the rallies were justified. “There should be no unauthorized protest activity,” he said. “Obviously, this type of activity should be brought to an end quite firmly.”

New accusations of brutal treatment and torture emerged on Wednesday as protesters held in police stations overnight began to be released. An activist told Russian media that officers from a Moscow police station put a plastic bag over her head and threatened her with a taser in order to force her to give up her phone password, which she ultimately did.

A total of 1,438 people were arrested across the country on Tuesday, monitor OVD-Info reported. Many have been sent to prisons already overcrowded with protesters being held over the past two weeks.

In one case, protesters detained at a rally on Sunday posted a video two days later saying they were being held by police on a bus in temperatures of -11 ° C because there was no space in a local immigrant prison that was used to help deal with the thousands of inmates.

“For the past nine hours we have been held up on a bus where we are forced to stand,” one man said in a video posted online. “We have no water. We are not taken to the bathroom. There are dozens of others [buses] with detainees held here as well.

The crackdown continued on Wednesday as a judge jailed the editor of the MediaZona website, which covers Russian justice and prison systems, for 25 days for retweeting a joke on Twitter that included details of a rally January 23. Editor-in-chief Sergei Smirnov did not attend the protest.

Born in 1976 just outside Moscow, Alexei Navalny is a lawyer turned activist whose Anti-Corruption Foundation is investigating the wealth of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

He started out as a Russian nationalist, but became the main leader of the Russian democratic opposition in the wave of protests that led to the 2012 presidential election, and has since been a thorn in the Kremlin camp. .

Navalny is not allowed to appear on state television, but has used social media to his advantage. A 2017 documentary accusing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of corruption received more than 30 million views on YouTube in two months.

He has been arrested and jailed several times. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia violated Navalny’s rights by keeping him under house arrest in 2014. Election officials banned him from running for president in 2018 due to a conviction for embezzlement which he said was politically motivated. Navalny told the commission that his decision would be a vote “not against me, but against 16,000 people who proposed to me; against 200,000 volunteers who applied for me ”.

There was also a physical price to pay. In April 2017, he was attacked with a green dye that nearly blinded him in one eye, and in July 2019, he was taken from prison to hospital with symptoms which one of his doctors said , could indicate poisoning. In 2020, he was hospitalized again after suspected poisoning and taken to Germany for treatment. The German government later said toxicology results showed Navalny had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.

Navalny was sent back to prison in February 2021, sentenced to two years and eight months, in a measure that sparked marches in Moscow and the arrest of more than 1,000 protesters

Photograph: Pavel Golovkin / AP

Tatiana Stanovaya, political analyst and founder of R.Politik, said the harsh sentence against Navalny was part of a campaign to “demonstrate that no initiative targeting the security services will go unpunished”.

She said the government was ready to resist the reaction to Navalny’s imprisonment, whether it be international condemnation or street protests in Russia. “Make no mistake, the Kremlin is not terribly afraid of protests,” she said.

The imprisonment of Navalny, arrested last month on his return to Russia after surviving an alleged FSB assassination attempt with the novichok poison, has sparked international outrage. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has demanded his unconditional and immediate release and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called the sentence “sheer cowardice”.