Navalny Taken from Russian Pre-Trial Detention Centre

A lawyer of the convicted opposition leader Alexei Navalny said that his client had been taken from the pre-trial detention centre and suggested that he could have been transferred to a penal colony.

“Today, when I came to the pre-trial detention centre to meet with Navalny, I was told that he had left the pre-trial detention centre. I was not told where he had been taken, most likely to the colony, but maybe somewhere else,” lawyer Vadim Kobzev said.

Navalny returned from Germany to Russia on 17 January and was detained at the Moscow airport on the grounds that he was wanted by the Federal Penitentiary Service.

A court sentenced Navalny on 2 February 2021. He had a suspended sentence of 3.5 years, but the court decided to replace it with a real one because Navalny did not come to the Federal Penitentiary Service to be marked as a person under suspended sentence in the Yves Rocher case. The politician’s lawyers stressed that he had not come because he was being treated in Berlin after poisoning with the Novichok warfare agent.

On 20 February, a court found Navalny guilty in a second case over the defamation of a war veteran.

As a reminder, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the 27 EU Member States made a political decision to impose new sanctions against those responsible for the arrest of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Natalia Tolub