NAVALNY STAYS IN JAIL AS RUSSIAN COURT CONFIRMS HIS SENTENCE

A Russian court confirmed the 30-day pretrial sentence of dissident Alexei Navalny on Thursday, January 28, 2021, rejecting an appeal by the Kremlin critic's lawyers to set him free, Hannah Wagner reported for Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa).

Navalny attended the hearing, which was broadcast live online from Moscow, via video link from prison. He returned to Russia earlier this month after receiving treatment in Germany following an assassination attempt with the nerve agent Novichok.

He was immediately detained upon his arrival and sentenced to pretrial detention. Navalny is accused by Russian prosecutors of violating the terms of a previous suspended sentence by travelling to Germany. He was comatose from the Novichok attack when he was brought to Germany.

Whether the earlier suspended sentence will be converted into a prison sentence, as prosecutors are calling for, will be decided in a trial on Tuesday.

Around 300,000 people took to the streets across Russia last weekend to call for Navalny's release, according to the organizers. More than 3,700 people were detained by security forces while demonstrating. Navalny's team have called for fresh protests on Sunday.

The prosecution in Moscow warned online platforms not to publish calls to renew unauthorized protests, after Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were fined last week in connection to the demonstrations. The prosecution also opened criminal proceeding against Navalny's chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, for "instigating" minors to participate in the protests, which Volkov has denied.

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