Russia jails opposition leader Alexei Navalny despite western outcry

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been jailed for 3½ years in a case that western states say is politically motivated and the anti-corruption campaigner believes was ordered by the country's president, Vladimir Putin.

A Moscow court ruled that Mr Navalny broke the terms of a suspended sentence by failing to report to Russian prison officials late last year, when he was recovering abroad from a near-fatal poisoning in Siberia.

He had already spent 10 months under house arrest so will be required to serve a further two years and eight months behind bars.

Tens of thousands of people across Russia have rallied in support of Mr Navalny (44) on recent weekends, and the United States and European Union warned Russia that relations could suffer further unless he was released.

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“The reason for all this is the hatred and fear of one man, living in a bunker. Because I mortally offended him simply by surviving when he ordered me to be killed,” Mr Navalny said of Mr Putin in the heavily guarded courtroom.

The judge dismissed Mr Navalny's insistence that Russian officials knew he was being treated in Berlin after last August's poisoning with a Novichok nerve agent.

The Bellingcat investigative group found evidence that the Russian security service was behind the attack, and Mr Navalny duped one of its officers into discussing the operation and subsequent clean-up efforts in a taped phone call, when he revealed that the poison had been put in the campaigner’s underwear.

“No matter how much [Mr Putin] pretends to be a great geo-politician, some kind of great world leader, he is angry with me now mainly because he will go down in history as a poisoner,” Mr Navalny told the court.

“There was [Tsar] Alexander the Liberator and Yaroslav the Wise. And there will also be Vladimir, the poisoner of underpants.”

Mr Navalny's calls for people to protest were boosted by his team's latest report, which accuses Mr Putin of secretly owning a €1 billion palace on the Black Sea. The Kremlin denies the claim, but the video has been watched 107 million times on YouTube and fed into widespread anger about rampant corruption in Russia.

“This is how it works: jail one to scare millions,” Mr Navalny said.

“But this is not a show of strength ... it’s a show of weakness,” he said of his trial. “It’s impossible to jail millions or hundreds of thousands. And I really hope that people will realise this more and more. And when they do – and that moment will come – then this whole thing will collapse. Because you can’t jail an entire country.”

The Kremlin denies playing any role in Mr Navalny’s poisoning – which Russian prosecutors refuse even to investigate – and accuses the West of whipping up protests to undermine Mr Putin’s regime.

"We hope nothing so stupid will happen as linking prospects for Russia-EU relations to the case of one occupant of a detention centre," said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, looking ahead to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell's planned visit to Moscow on Thursday.

“We are ready to consistently and patiently explain everything, but we are not prepared to respond to any mentor-style statements” on the case, he added.