Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny jailed for 30 days after returning to Moscow
He was arrested after flying to Russia from Germany, where was treated following the poisoning in August.
The Russian opposition leader Alexi Navalny has been detained for 30 days after returning to Moscow following being poisoned with a nerve agent.
In an extraordinary move by the Russian authorities, an hours long court meeting was held earlier in a police station where the Kremlin critic has been held since his arrest at a Moscow airport on Sunday.
Mr Navalny flew to Russia from Germany, where was treated following the poisoning in August that he blames on the Kremlin.
His spokesperson Kira Yarmysh announced on Twitter that he was being detained ahead of a trial that is due to be held next month.
Leaders from around the world criticised the arrest with the German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas calling it ‘completely incomprehensible.’
Mr Navalny’s allies said he was being held at a police precinct outside Moscow and has been refused access to his lawyer.
They say they were only notified minutes before the court hearing which decided whether Mr Navalny should remain in custody.
‘It is impossible what is happening over here,’ Mr Navalny said in video from the improvised court room, posted on his page in the messaging app Telegram. It is lawlessness of the highest degree.’
Calls for Mr Navalny’s immediate release have come from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and top officials of other EU nations.
US President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for national security adviser called on Russian authorities to free Mr Navalny.
‘Mr Navalny should be immediately released, and the perpetrators of the outrageous attack on his life must be held accountable,’ Jake Sullivan tweeted.
The outgoing US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said the US ‘strongly condemns’ the decision to arrest Mr Navalny.
Nevertheless, the judge ordered that Mr Navalny be remanded in custody until February 15, Ms Yarmysh said on Twitter.
His lawyer Vadim Kobzev told the Interfax news agency that the defence plans to appeal against the ruling.
Mr Navalny’s detention was widely expected because Russia’s prisons service said he had violated probation terms from a suspended sentence on a 2014 money-laundering conviction.
The service said it would seek to have Mr Navalny serve his three-and-a-half-year sentence behind bars.
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has claimed the arrest was not politically motivated but ‘a matter of observing the law.’
Mr Navalny fell into a coma while aboard a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20.
He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a Berlin hospital two days later.
Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.
Russian authorities insisted that the doctors who treated Mr Navalny in Siberia before he was airlifted to Germany found no traces of poison.
Mr Navalny had repeatedly said he would come back to Russia despite threats of arrest, saying he did not leave the country by choice, but rather ‘ended up in Germany in an intensive care box’, and he was still dedicated to his cause.
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