Moscow: A Moscow court on Tuesday granted a prosecutors’ request for Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny to serve prison time for violating the terms of his parole.
Judge Natalya Repnikova ordered a suspended three-and-a-half-year sentence Navalny received in 2014 to be changed to time in a penal colony, an AFP journalist at the courthouse said.
Repnikova said time Navalny previously spent under house arrest in the sentence would count as time served, and, according to his team, that would mean at least two-and-a-half years in prison now.
Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK) immediately called for supporters to protest in central Moscow.
“We’re going to the centre of Moscow right now,” it wrote on Twitter, urging supporters to join them.
The 44-year-old anti-corruption campaigner was detained on January 17 when he returned to Moscow from Germany, where he had spent months recovering from a nerve agent poisoning in August that he blames on President Vladimir Putin.
He…