Agency Report
Russia on Friday sentenced in absentia the brother of imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny to one year in prison for violating terms of a suspended sentence, expanding a protracted opposition crackdown.
The ruling against Oleg Navalny comes one year after his brother was thrown in jail for two-and-a-half years on old fraud charges, the first of several controversial rulings that abruptly halted opposition politics in the country.
Alexei Navalny’s political and anti-corruption organisations were declared extremist and shuttered. Most of his allies fled the country and those remaining face persecution.
On Friday, a district court in Moscow “replaced Oleg Navalny’s suspended sentence… with jail time,” his lawyer Nikos Paraskevov wrote on Twitter.
The 38-year-old was given the suspended sentence in August last year for violating coronavirus-restrictions.
He was accused of calling on Russians to attend an unsanctioned rally in January 2021 in support of his detained brother.
Alexei Navalny, 45, was swept up by police last January in a Moscow airport on his return to Russia from Germany where he had been recovering from a near-fatal poisoning attack.
Oleg Navalny was not present at the trial Friday.
According to court documents cited by news agencies, he travelled to Cyprus in September last year and did not return to Russia.
In January, Russia’s prison authorities lodged a request to convert his sentence to jail time after he did not report for police inspections. Authorities issued an arrest warrant.
