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The Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny is expected to return to Moscow on Sunday evening nearly five months after a suspected poisoning by Russia’s FSB spy agency left him fighting for his life.
Navalny’s return is a direct challenge to Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, which has sought to keep the opposition leader in exile by indirectly threatening him with prosecution and jail time if he comes back.
Mr Navalny is expected to land at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport at 4.20pm on a flight from Berlin, where he has been recuperating from the poisoning attack since August.
It appears likely that he will be taken into custody on arrival. Moscow’s prison service says that it has orders to detain him for parole violations that could lead to up to three and a half years in prison, and the Investigative Committee says it is investigating him for massive fraud in a separate case that could carry a decade-long sentence.
“The question of returning or not was never before me,” Mr Navalny wrote in an online post earlier this week, calling on supporters to “meet me” at the airport. Russian police have said they have begun detaining his supporters travelling to Moscow for planning to hold an “illegal” rally. The airport has said that it cannot host mass events due to the coronavirus epidemic.
The Kremlin is likely to seek retaliation for a Bellingcat investigation that traced an FSB hit team which shadowed Navalny around Russia for years. Mr Navalny himself elicited a confession by telephone from one of the men who took part in the operation.
The revelations were deeply embarrassing for the Kremlin. Mr Putin called the report a “falsification” and accused Mr Navalny of being backed by western intelligence agencies. Investigators have also refused to open a criminal case about Mr Navalny’s poisoning, saying they had “[no] concrete evidence about circumstances indicating the signs of criminal activity by members of Russia’s FSB”
Doctors at Berlin’s Charite clinic have described the poison used against Navalny as one of the novichok series, similar to the one used in the 2018 attack in Salisbury.
On the eve of his arrival, Mr Navalny wrote posts thanking Germans for their hospitality and promising supporters that he would indeed be flying into Moscow on Sunday. –Guardian