Navalny flies back 'home' to Russia despite arrest threats from prison service

Kremlin arch-foe Alexie Navalny on January 17 returns to Russia from Germany, despite Federal Penitentiary Service FSIN’s warnings of detention for flouting the suspended sentence. Russia's prison service said in a statement that the top Kremlin critic will be arrested ‘immediately’ when he returns from Germany. Navalny, however, accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of trying to deter him from coming home. Kremlin meanwhile denied allegations, stating that Navalny violated the probation that he received for 2014 conviction on charges of embezzlement and money laundering. 

According to sources of Kyiv Post, the 44-year-old opposition leader decided to return home after convalescing in Germany for several months since August, following his poisoning onboard a plane with a nerve agent Novichok. The FSIN, in a statement, said Thursday that it issued an arrest warrant for Navalny in late December after he failed to report to its office. Prison service had appealed to the Moscow court to overturn Navalny's 3 1/2 years sentence for fraud, adding that the court of law was “obliged to take all the necessary action to detain Navalny pending the court's ruling.” 

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Read: Russian Investigators Open New Fraud Probe Involving Navalny

Navalny says: 'I didn't leave'

In a statement to the press, Navalny said, Russia is his country and Moscow his city that he misses. And therefore, he planned to return to Russia. "There was never any question of 'returning or not' for me. Simply because I didn't leave. I wound up in Germany, having arrived in a resuscitation box, for one reason: they tried to kill me. I survived," Navalny wrote in an Instagram post. Kremlin critics’ remarks were made after a European Court of Human Rights dismissed his fraud charges as ‘unlawful’. Meanwhile, he denied the charges saying, that he was being 'fabricated' by the Russian government and was a victim of negative press on state-controlled TV.

According to a statement issued by FSIN, Navalny was supposed to report to them at least twice a month as part of his probation period that ended on Dec. 29 last year. He, however, did not report for registration on six occasions, and each violation led to official warnings. The FSIN asserted that Navalny's suspended sentence was now replaced with real incarceration. The federal prison service urged Putin's rival to "come home". 

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