Alexei Martynov, director of the Institute of the Newest States, told Izvestia that blogger Alexei Navalny would be “delicately” detained and sent to court on January 17, as soon as he crosses the Russian border.
“Of course, he will be detained as soon as he crosses the border and is interrogated. Now they are thinking about how to do it better to make it more delicate. This is done for the sake of hype, but for the sake of compliance with the law. The law is the same for everyone, including Navalny, ”the political scientist said.
He noted that the blogger will be sent to court, where a decision will be made in the measure of suppression. Martynov did not rule out that the oppositionist could be taken into custody.
In turn, a member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, Alexander Vorontsov, said that the Federal Penitentiary Service in this case is executing the court’s verdict, and is taking all the measures established by law for its execution. He noted that the conditions of conditional conviction were initially spelled out in the verdict. In particular, we are talking about the contact of the conditionally convicted person with the inspector of the criminal executive inspection on the established dates.
“Moreover, in modern conditions of the coronavirus epidemic, it is possible even by phone. You can say that you are ill and you cannot come in person and tell by phone where you are, ”said a member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation.
If a person changed his place of residence without notice or stopped communicating, the FSIN has grounds after the first omission of contact, to apply sanctions – to go to court with a petition to change the punishment, concluded Vorontsov.
Earlier on January 14, the Office of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) in Moscow announced that they would detain Navalny pending a court decision to replace the suspended sentence with a real one.
The day before, the blogger announced on social networks that he would return to Moscow from Germany on January 17. At the same time, a week earlier, in the system of the Simonovsky District Court of Moscow, a case appeared on the cancellation of the suspended sentence for the oppositionist.
At the end of December, the FSIN announced that Navalny was evading the control assigned to him by the court, since the treatment in Germany was about to come to an end. The service then stated that Part 4 of Art. 190 of the Criminal Executive Code, according to which the department may ask the court to impose a real sentence instead of a suspended one. It was also reported that a criminal case was opened against the blogger for embezzlement of donations to a number of his organizations in the amount of 356 million rubles. According to the Investigative Committee, part of the funds that were collected from citizens for the needs of a number of non-profit organizations headed by Navalny were spent by him for personal purposes.
Navalny had been in Germany since August 22, where he was taken to the Charite clinic for treatment. He felt unwell on August 20 during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The plane had to be urgently landed in Omsk. Navalny was first taken to the Omsk hospital, after which he was transported to Germany. On September 23, the Russian was discharged from a German hospital.
The alleged detection of signs of intoxication with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors at Navalny became known already upon his arrival in Germany. Omsk doctors during the examination did not find intoxication with the substance.
The German government, relying on data from a special laboratory of the Bundeswehr, said that the blogger was allegedly poisoned with a substance from the Novichok group, without providing any evidence. In mid-October, the EU imposed sanctions on Russian officials over an incident with a blogger.