Russian authorities ordered opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has been in Germany since he was poisoned and hospitalized, to return to Russia by Tuesday or face arrest.
Russia’s Federal Prison Service (FSIN) claimed Navalny was in violation of the terms of a suspended prison sentence from a 2014 theft conviction, Reuters reported. Navalny has claimed the conviction and sentence were politically motivated.
The FSIN cited an article in British medical journal The Lancet asserting that Navalny left the hospital on Sept. 20 and was free of symptoms by mid-October. By remaining abroad after his medical treatment has concluded, Navalny “is not fulfilling all of the obligations placed on him by the court, and is evading the supervision of the Criminal Inspectorate,” the FSIN claimed.
“There’s no way he could appear at the Moscow Criminal Inspectorate tomorrow,” Kira Yarmysh, a spokeswoman for Navalny, said on Twitter. “But does the FSIN really care about common sense? They were given an order, they are fulfilling it.”
Navalny became ill on a Russian flight and was rushed first to a hospital in Omsk, Russia, and later to Berlin.
In December, he said he had called the head of an FSB toxins squad while impersonating a Kremlin official. Navalny released a tape in which the operative seemingly confirmed his poisoning had been ordered and that the nerve agent Novichok had been applied to the inseam of his underpants.
The Kremlin has mocked Navalny’s allegations, with Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggesting the opposition leader suffers from “a pronounced persecution mania.”