(Moscow) The main Russian opponent Alexei Navalny said he had no regrets on Monday, a year to the day after his arrest on his return to the country, calling on Russians not to be afraid despite the repression.
Posted at 7:47 a.m.
“I did it, I don’t regret it for a second,” he wrote on social media, about his fight against the Kremlin and his return to the country despite the likelihood of his arrest after months. of convalescence.
His arrest was the starting point for a wave of repression against the opposition, the media and civil society deemed critical of the authorities and Vladimir Putin.
The opponent, once omnipresent in the demonstrations and on social networks, now only expresses himself in written messages online relayed by his lawyers.
“After a year in prison, I tell you what I shouted to those (who supported me then) in court: do not be afraid,” said the opponent again. “This is our country and we have no other.”
His post on Monday is accompanied by a photo of him in prison uniform with his wife, Yulia.
On Monday, he also appeared by video in a court in Petushki, in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow, where he is imprisoned, for two complaints he filed against the prison administration.
Mr Navalny was taking part in the hearing via video link, locked in a cage and dressed in an inmate uniform, according to footage from independent online channel Dojd.
Alexei Navalny was arrested on January 17, 2021 in Moscow, on his return from convalescence in Germany after a serious poisoning in Siberia in August, for which he holds President Putin responsible.
Russia has never opened an investigation into this assassination attempt, claiming to have no clues to this effect and accusing Berlin of not sharing the opponent’s medical analyzes.
This militant defender of the corruption of the Russian elites was then given a sentence of two and a half years in prison in a case of “fraud” which he describes as political.
This condemnation sparked a torrent of international condemnations and new Western sanctions against Moscow.
One of his lieutenants who now lives in exile, Leonid Volkov, estimated on Monday on social networks that January 17 “would go down in history as the beginning of the end of Putinism”.
New trial in sight
The arrest of Alexei Navalny sparked several days of protests a year ago, but they were quickly and brutally suppressed.
Then it was his movement that was banned in June for extremism, while opponents, media and NGOs deemed critical of the Kremlin suffered a growing wave of repression. Many personalities have chosen exile for fear of being imprisoned.
Mr. Navalny is also the target of new prosecutions for “extremism”, which could allow him to be kept in prison for many years.
According to him, he will soon be “in court” in another case, the charge of which he did not specify on Monday.
The repression of his movement was followed by increasing pressure on media critical of the Kremlin and NGOs, designated at all costs “foreign agents”, an infamous label that greatly complicates their work, under penalty of serious legal problems.
Last December, the NGO Memorial, a pillar of the defense of human rights and a guardian of the memory of the victims of the Gulag, was banned by the Russian courts for not having respected its obligations as an “agent of the ‘foreigner “.
This repression is also illustrated on the internet and Russia constantly sanctions large digital companies, especially foreign ones, accused in particular of not erasing content linked to the opposition.