MOSCOW: Russia has put the brother of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny on a wanted list, according to interior ministry records, as he faces a summons to a court hearing that will lift the suspended sentence against him. Jail term may change.
Oleg Navalny, whose whereabouts are unknown, was placed under house arrest between January and April last year and given a one-year suspended sentence for violating safety rules linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.
These charges were filed after attending a rally in Moscow against the arrest of his brother Alexei.
His lawyer said on Wednesday that the Federal Penitentiary Service would file a petition in a Moscow court on February 18 to sentence Oleg Navalny to prison for failing to comply with sanctions imposed for violating security rules.
The 38-year-old was released from prison in 2018 after serving a three-and-a-half-year sentence on fraud charges, a move critics say was designed to pressure his brother and stifle dissent.
Alexei Navalny was given a suspended sentence in the same case, which was converted to a prison sentence last year for alleged parole violations. He says that the allegations against him are politically motivated.
An anti-corruption campaigner and high-profile critic of President Vladimir Putin for the past decade, he survived a nerve agent poisoning in 2020 and his political network was banned last year as an “extremist”.
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