Putin critic Alexei Navalny kisses wife goodbye as he is arrested by Russian police in Moscow

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Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny kissed his wife goodbye in an emotional scene as he was arrested by Russian authorities just minutes after landing in Moscow.

Navalny was detained by police at the city’s Sheremetyevo airport after he landed on a flight from Berlin. 

Officers arrested Navalny when he showed his passport to border guards before formally entering Russia, five months after he was poisoned by a Novichok nerve agent.

He was pictured hugging and kissing his wife Yulia, who has since been allowed to enter Russia, before being taken away by the officers.   

His spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh confirmed he had been arrested, saying on Twitter: ‘Alexei was taken away by police officers at the border. With no explanation given.’ 

Navalny, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critics, had boarded the plane bound for Moscow today, despite Russian authorities’ stated desire to arrest him and potentially jail him for years. 

Russia’s Federal Prison Service said in a statement Nevalny has been detained due to the alleged violations of his suspended prison sentence for embezzlement. 

They said he would be held in custody until a court hearing later this month that will rule whether to convert his suspended sentence into a real time three and a half year jail term.

Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, responded to a question about the arrest by saying ‘Was he arrested in Germany? I’m not up to date,’ according to the online news site Podyom. Peskov, like Putin, is noted for avoiding saying Navalny’s name. 

Russian police on Sunday already detained four of his top allies who had gathered at Vnukovo airport in Moscow, where he had been due to land, before the flight was diverted to Sheremetyevo. 

More than 250,000 people were tracking his flight’s progress online – and several hundred of his supporters who had gathered outside Vnukovo aiport to meet him on his return were left disappointed at the plane’s diversion to Sheremetyevo.

His plane from Berlin was diverted at the last minute in an apparent effort by authorities to thwart journalists and supporters greeting him.  

Navalny was flown to Berlin in August for emergency medical treatment after being poisoned with what German tests showed was a Novichok nerve agent.

He announced his decision to return from Germany on Wednesday, and a day later Moscow’s prison service said it would do everything to arrest him once he returned, accusing him of flouting the terms of a suspended prison sentence for embezzlement, a 2014 case he says was trumped up.  

The 44-year-old, who boarded a plane in Berlin at the last minute from a car sitting on the tarmac, hence avoiding other passengers, said he was delighted to be flying home and made light of the risk of being arrested.

But footage from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport showed Navalny becoming emotional as he kissed his wife goodbye before being taken away by uniformed officers.  

Earlier this week, authorities asked a Moscow court to turn Navalny’s suspended sentence on fraud charges into real jail time for violating the terms of his sentence.

FSIN said that Navalny was obliged to report to them at least twice a month as part of his probation period that ended on December 29 last year.

It added that in 2020 Navalny did not report for registration on six occasions.

‘For each violation by A.A. Navalny official warnings were issued about the possibility of the suspended sentence being cancelled and replaced with real incarceration,’ the prison service added.

‘This is the best moment in the last five months,’ he told reporters who had bought seats on the same plane carrying him back to Moscow. ‘I feel great. Finally, I’m returning to my home town.’

He said he didn’t think he would be arrested, calling himself an innocent person.

‘What do I need to be afraid of? What bad thing can happen to me in Russia?’ he added. ‘I feel like a citizen of Russia who has every right to return,’ he added.

He was accompanied by his wife Yulia, and his spokeswoman.

Navalny, who is hoping for success in parliamentary elections in September, faces potential trouble in three other criminal cases too, all of which he says are politically motivated. 

His return poses a conundrum for the Kremlin: jail him and risk protests and punitive Western action by turning him into a political martyr. Or do nothing and risk looking weak in the eyes of Kremlin hardliners. 

The opposition politician, who says he has nearly fully recovered, says Putin was behind his poisoning. The Kremlin denies involvement, says it has seen no evidence that he was poisoned, and that he is free to return to Russia.

Navalny says the Kremlin is afraid of him. The Kremlin, which only refers to him as the ‘Berlin patient,’ laughs that off. Putin allies point to opinion polls that show the Russian leader is far more popular than Navalny, whom they call a blogger rather than a politician.   

Navalny took a flight operated by Russian airline Pobeda, owned by state-controlled Aeroflot.  

His supporters planned to meet him at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport despite a forecast of bitterly cold minus 20 Celsius weather and over 4,500 new coronavirus cases a day in the Russian capital. 

But they were left disappointed after the flight was diverted at the last minute to Sheremetyevo.  

The OVD-Info organization that monitors political arrests said at least 37 people were detained by police at Vnukovo, where the arrivals hall had been blocked off and prisoner transport vehicles were parked outside.

The independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and opposition social media reported Sunday that several Navalny supporters in St. Petersburg had been removed from Moscow-bound trains or been prevented from boarding flights late Saturday and early Sunday, including the coordinator of his staff for the region of Russia’s second-largest city. 

The Moscow prosecutor’s office, which says it has officially warned 15 pro-Navalny organisers who were planning to meet Navalny at Vnukovo airport, has said the event is illegal because it is not sanctioned by the authorities. That means that people who turn up could be detained, fined or jailed.

Reuters reporters saw a heavy police presence at the airport with dozens of police trucks.

Citing COVID-19 restrictions, the airport has said it will not allow media inside. 

Navalny fell into a coma while aboard a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20. He was airlifted from a hospital in Siberia to Berlin two days later, where a military lab found evidence of Novichok.  

Russian authorities insisted that the doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia before he was airlifted to Germany found no traces of poison and have challenged German officials to provide proof of his poisoning. 

The Kremlin has rejected calls to open a full investigation into the poisoning, citing a lack of evidence that Navalny was poisoned, and denied Navalny’s claims that the FSB security agency was behind the plot.  

Last month, Navalny released the recording of a phone call he said he made to a man he described as an alleged member of a group of officers of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, who purportedly poisoned him in August and then tried to cover it up. The FSB dismissed the recording as fake.

Navalny Tweeted on Tuesday: ‘Putin is so mad at me for surviving his poisoning that he ordered the Federal Penitentiary Service to replace my suspended sentence with a real one.’ 

Last month, Russia’s prison service ordered him to fly back from Germany and report at a Moscow office or be jailed if he failed to return before a deadline.

The country’s federal prison service accused him of violating the terms of a suspended sentence dating from 2014. 

It came just a day before the end of a probation period for the three-and-a-half-year prison term over a theft case which Navalny says was politically motivated.   

‘The convicted man is not fulfilling all of the obligations placed on him by the court, and is evading the supervision of the Criminal Inspectorate,’ a statement said. 

The prison service stated no deadline, but Navalny posted a screenshot of a message to his lawyer which said he had until 9am on December 29 to show up at a Moscow office. 

His spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said it was impossible for Navalny to return in time and accused the prison service of acting on orders from the Kremlin. 

She said at the time: ‘There’s no way he could appear at the Moscow Criminal Inspectorate tomorrow. 

‘But does the [prison service] really care about common sense? They were given an order, they are fulfilling it.’

Navalny has been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side for more than a decade, exposing what he says is high-level corruption and mobilising protests. 

He has been repeatedly detained for organising public meetings, sued over corruption investigations and was barred from running against Putin in the 2018 presidential election.

The 44-year-old has also served several stints in jail in recent years for organising anti-Kremlin protests. 

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Russia’s arrests and detention of Navalny in 2012 and 2014 were politically motivated.