14 January,2021 07:13 AM IST | Moscow | Agencies
Alexei Navalny with his wife Yulia and their children. File pic/AP
Top Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said on Wednesday he would go home over the weekend despite the Russian prison service's latest motion to put him behind bars for allegedly breaching the terms of his suspended sentence and probation.
Navalny, who has been convalescing in Germany from an August poisoning with a nerve agent that he has blamed on the Kremlin, charged that Russian President Vladimir Putin was now trying to deter him from coming home with new legal motions.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied a role in the opposition leader's poisoning. "Putin is stamping his feet demanding to do everything so that that I don't return home," Navalny said on Instagram, pointing at the Federal Penitentiary Service's appeal to court to replace his suspended sentence with a real one.
Will fly on Sunday
He said he will fly home from Germany on Sunday. At the end of December, the Federal Penitentiary Service demanded that Navalny report to its office in line with the terms of a suspended sentence he received for a 2014 conviction on charges of embezzlement and money-laundering. It warned that he faced prison time, if he failed to appear. Navalny says his suspended sentence ended on December 30. He also noted the European Court for Human Rights had ruled that his 2014 conviction was unlawful.
