Has Alexei Navalny's wife, Yulia, been arrested too? Putin's nemesis already sentenced to 3.5 years in prison
In a bizarre judgment, Moscow’s Simonovsky District Court sentenced the Russian opposition figure and fierce Kremlin critic, Alexei Navalny, to 3.5 years in prison for violating the terms of his probation. The court gave him credit for about a year of the sentence he had already served under house arrest, saying he would be required to spend another 2 years and 8 months behind bars.
The judgment was a ruling on Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service complaint against Navalny, filed mid-January, arguing that he violated his parole during the months he spent in Germany recovering from an apparent attempt on his life using a deadly chemical nerve agent, Novichok, in August 2020. In the heated courtroom hearing, Navalny ridiculed claims he broke his parole conditions while in a coma and denounced Russia's leader as "Putin the poisoner." Speaking from a glass cage in the courtroom, Navalny attributed his arrest to Putin’s “fear and hatred”.
“I have deeply offended him simply by surviving the assassination attempt that he ordered,” he said. “The aim of that hearing is to scare a great number of people,” Navalny said. “You can’t jail the entire country.” After the court made its ruling, he added, "This isn't a demonstration of strength, it's a show of weakness".
Navalny had spent five months in Germany recovering from Novichok poisoning before his return to Moscow on January 17 when he was arrested. Since then, Navalny has been in detention at Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison. He has blamed the poison attack on Russian security services and Putin himself -- accusations that the Kremlin has repeatedly denied.
Has Alexei Navalny's wife also been arrested?
Riot police broke up protests across Russia on January 31 in support of Navalny, detaining more than 5,300 people who had braved the bitter cold and the threat of prosecution to demand he be set free. Among them was Alexei Navalny's wife, Yulia Navalny. She was fined 20,000 roubles ($265) for taking part in the 'unsanctioned protests' by a Russian court. She had posted a picture of her marching during the protests on her Instagram page.
Authorities had closed subway stations near the Kremlin, cutting traffic and ordering restaurants and stores to stay closed. They had also threatened stiff prison sentences for protesters. Despite this, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand the release of Alexei Navalny. They were met with a huge show of force from the riot police. The protests have been the largest, most widespread show of discontent that Russia has seen in years.
The Navalny couple has two children, daughter Daria, currently an undergraduate student at Stanford University, and son Zakhar. Since 1998, the family's home in Russia has been a three-room apartment in Maryino District in southeast Moscow. Yulia Navalny had also posted a picture of her family which she captioned with the words: "This is my family. The two honest young men in this picture are demonstratively arrested without any semblance of law. One for the fact that they tried to poison him, and he dared to survive. The second was taken hostage because he has the same surname - Navalny. If we are silent, then tomorrow they will come for any of us."
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What was Alexei Navalny's original prison sentence for?
Navalny had earlier been detained for two weeks upon his return to Moscow from Berlin. Even then, he had been accused of failing to meet his parole terms under a 2014 suspended sentence for embezzlement -- a case he has dismissed as politically motivated. On October 17, 2017, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny and his brother Oleg were unfairly convicted of financial crimes at a trial in the so-called Yves Rocher case in 2014.
Alexei and Oleg Navalny were convicted of stealing about $500,000 from two Russian firms, one of which was affiliated with French cosmetics company Yves Rocher, between 2008 and 2012, and of laundering some of the money. Both were sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison. While Alexei's sentence was suspended at the time, Oleg Navalny was imprisoned. The brothers denied the charges, saying the case was politically motivated -- in part as an effort to deter Alexei from his opposition activities by making his brother into a "hostage" held behind bars.
The ECHR said that Russian courts handed down "arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable" decisions in the case.