Moscow, Russia:
A Moscow appeal court on Saturday upheld a prison sentence imposed on chief Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny following he returned to Russia from Germany final month.
Judge Dmitry Balashov rejected Navalny’s appeal of the February 2 ruling, which turned a 2014 suspended sentence on embezzlement charges into genuine jail time.
The judge decided to count six weeks Navalny was beneath property arrest as aspect of the time served, so he will now be imprisoned for just more than two-and-a-half years in a penal colony.
Navalny, a 44-year-old anti-corruption campaigner who has emerged as President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent opponent, was arrested in January when he returned to Russia following months in Germany recovering from a nerve agent poisoning he blames on the Kremlin.
He was detained for violating parole circumstances of the 2014 suspended sentence and it was then turned into a custodial sentence.
Navalny and his supporters say the rulings and various other situations against him are a pretext to silence his corruption exposes and quash his political ambitions.
He was due in court once again later Saturday in a yet another trial exactly where he is accused of defamation for calling a World War II veteran a “traitor” following he appeared in a pro-Kremlin video.
Prosecutors have known as for Navalny to be fined the equivalent of $13,000 in that case. They also want his 2014 sentence turned into genuine jail time due to the fact the alleged defamation took location though he was serving the suspended term.
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