This is the US State Department trying to organise a Maidan in Moscow.
The hypocrisy of the west is boundless. Navalny is a convicted fraudster (convicted for real crimes, not political ones) - and moreover inexplicably being treated with kid gloves by the authorities.
Imagine if a convicted criminal took over an "anti-corruption campaign" in the United States - and moreover, was being paid for by Moscow!
It seems to me that, unless things deteriorate markedly in Russia this will go nowhere although there are obviously young fascists who wish the mayhem and violence of the Maidan on Russia
Opposition activist Navalny detained at Moscow rally, defying house arrest
The hypocrisy of the west is boundless. Navalny is a convicted fraudster (convicted for real crimes, not political ones) - and moreover inexplicably being treated with kid gloves by the authorities.
Imagine if a convicted criminal took over an "anti-corruption campaign" in the United States - and moreover, was being paid for by Moscow!
It seems to me that, unless things deteriorate markedly in Russia this will go nowhere although there are obviously young fascists who wish the mayhem and violence of the Maidan on Russia
Opposition activist Navalny detained at Moscow rally, defying house arrest
30
December, 2014
Opposition
activist Aleksey Navalny, who was given a 3 1/2-year suspended
sentence in an embezzlement case Tuesday, has been detained at an
unsanctioned rally in Moscow after defying house arrest. Police said
1,500 people attended, and 100 were detained.
Navalny
was detained as he was on his way to a rally supporting him at
Manezhnaya Square, and was sent home by police.
“Police
officers have detained Aleksey Navalny, who defied house arrest,” the
police said in a statement. “Accompanied
by the Federal Penitentiary Service, he will be taken to the place of
his residence.”
Earlier,
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said it had recorded a
violation of Navalny’s house arrest and notified the court, a
spokesman for the service said.
"I
was detained,"
Navalny said on his Twitter account. "But
they won't be able to detain everyone".
The
rally, which was not sanctioned by Moscow authorities, is taking
place near the Kremlin walls. Security was beefed up at the square
ahead of the demonstration, which was initially scheduled for January
15, but was moved forward in response to the court’s Tuesday
announcement in the Navalny brothers’ case.
According
to security officials' estimates, some 1,500 protesters attended the
rally, while about 100 were detained for disorderly conduct.
Smaller
rallies in support of Navalny took place in other Russian cities
including Saint Petersburg, Samara and Yekaterinburg.
On
Tuesday morning, a Moscow district court announced the sentence to
Aleksey Navalny and his brother Oleg in a case of embezzlement
involving Yves Rocher stores in Russia. The verdict was initially
scheduled for January 15, but was brought forward to December 30.
Aleksey
Navalny received a suspended 3 1/2 year sentence, after being accused
of embezzling over $500,000 from the cosmetics company, while his
brother was also found guilty and received a sentence of 3 1/2 years
in prison.
In
response to Navalny’s verdict, the EU said that the convictions
seemed to be “politically
motivated,”
while the US said that it was a “disturbing
development.”
The
overall amount of money paid by Yves Rocher to the Navalny brothers
exceeded 55 million rubles (over $1.6 million at the time) and the
pocketed margin was over 20 million rubles ($600,000), according to
the company’s claim. Additionally, the brothers were accused of
laundering the money with the help of a different family enterprise.
Aleksey
Navalny was charged with fraud and money laundering of 30 million
rubles ($518,000) and has been under house arrest since February.
Navalny has repeatedly said the claims were false and instigated by the authorities as “revenge” for his anti-corruption activism. Navalny has a popular anti-corruption blog in which he has accused many government officials of money laundering.
The latest case is not Navalny’s first trial. In 2013 he received a five-year suspended sentence for taking part in a graft scheme involving a state-owned timber company in central Russia’s Kirov Region.
Here are the darlings of the Guardian – the voices of freedom (and mayhem) and enemies of the Orthodox church
The anarchist group Pussy Riot/Voina is back in the game. It just released a new video in support of today's protest against #Navalny's brother's sentence for fraud against French cosmetics firm Yves Rocher - essentially calling for a "Maidan" in Moscow
Ведьмы из Pussy Riot чистят Манежку
This is how the Empire’s presstitutes reported it
Alexei
Navalny detained after breaking house arrest to join rally in Moscow
Demonstration
comes after court gave Putin critic suspended sentence but jailed his
brother for three and a half years
26
November, 2014
The
Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was arrested on Tuesday after breaking
house arrest to join an opposition rally in Moscow, hours after a
court gave him a suspended sentence for fraud. His brother, Oleg, was
jailed for three and a half years for the same offence.
Police
arrested Navalny soon after he emerged from the metro. Officers
detained him outside the Ritz Carlton hotel, in Tverskaya street,
before he had a chance to join demonstrators trying to reach the
heavily guarded Manezh square, directly in front of the Kremlin.
Thousands
of protesters gathered in freezing conditions to protest against the
verdict on Navalny and his brother. They chanted anti-Putin slogans
including: “No Putin, no war”, “Crimea is not ours”, “Putin
is a thief” and “freedom”. More than 100 protesters were
arrested, including a Wall Street Journal reporter, and loaded into
waiting buses, to cries of “shame!”.
“Look
how much they fear us, as if we were enemies. Navalny and [Russian
president Vladimir] Putin are now real enemies. Today’s verdict
made Alexei very angry,” Svetlana Guseva, an oncologist and
longtime opposition activist, said. “Anger will make us stronger,”
she added.
Some
of those detained tweeted
photos from inside police vans. Navalny
tweeted that
officials had taken him to a police station and then taken him back
to his flat.
Five police guards stood outside his door to prevent him from leaving again.
Five police guards stood outside his door to prevent him from leaving again.
In
a case which critics say was politically motivated, the judge earlier
handed Navalny – Vladimir Putin’s most high-profile opponent –
a suspended three-and-a-half-year sentence. He had faced up to 10
years in jail. But in an unexpected move, the court jailed Oleg
Navalny and sent him to a penal colony.
Policemen detain a supporter of
Alexei Navalny during the rally. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov /EPA
It
was unclear whether Alexei Navalny now faces a similar term behind
bars after deliberately breaking his bail conditions on Tuesday. He
is under house arrest following an earlier conviction. Setting off to
the demonstration, he tweeted from the metro: “Yes, there is this
house arrest. But today I want to be with you. So I’m coming too.”
Navalny’s
supporters said Tuesday’s verdict showed the Kremlin was returning
to the Soviet-era practice of punishing the relatives of those it
disliked.
Both
men were found guilty of stealing 30m roubles (about £334,000 under
the current exchange rate) from the French cosmetics company Yves
Rocher. Asked by the judge, Yelena Korobchenko, if the rulings
against them were clear, Alexei replied: “Nothing is clear. Why are
you imprisoning my brother? By this you punish me even harder.”
A group of police officers detain
one of Alexei Navalny’s supporters at the rally.Photograph: Sergei
Ilnitsky/EPA
The
sentencing had originally been scheduled for 15 January, but was
abruptly brought forward to the day before New Year’s Eve, the main
Russian holiday, in an apparent attempt to prevent large-scale
anti-Putin demonstrations. Riot police and military vehicles flooded
Manezh Square in anticipation of protests. The authorities had not
given permission for the rally, so it was considered illegal.
“Of
all the possible types of sentence, this is the meanest,” said
Alexei Navalny outside court after his brother was taken away. “The
government isn’t just trying to jail its political opponents –
we’re used to it, we’re aware that they’re doing it – but
this time they’re destroying and torturing the families of the
people who oppose them,” he said.
Writing on
his blog,,
Navalny said his brother’s sentence would not stop him from
political activity. He lambasted those at the top of Kremlin power as
“thieves, scoundrels and traitors who must be destroyed”. He also
said ordinary Russians were guilty of allowing the political elite to
plunder the country. “We let them through our passivity,” he
wrote.
.
Critics
said the move was the latest attempt by the Kremlin to shut down
Navalny’s long-running anti-corruption campaign against Putin.
Navalny’s friend, the opposition leader Ilya Yashin, said: “By
taking his own brother as a political hostage, the sinister Kremlin
wants to squash Navalny’s spirit, so he shuts up.”
The
editor-in-chief of the liberal radio Echo of Moscow, Aleksei
Venedictov, described the Kremlin’s perceived new strategy against
Navalny as “sophisticated torture”.
“The
verdict is purely political. The Kremlin weakens Alexei by giving him
thousands of little wounds. First they keep him for months under
house arrest, forbid him to use the internet, then put him on trial,
then throw his brother in jail – taking family members hostage is a
sensational new strategy,” Venediktov told the Guardian.
Oleg
Navalny is the father of two small children and a former executive of
the state-owned postal service. Unlike his better-known brother, he
has never played a role in the Russian opposition movement. His
imprisonment in a penal colony seems to echo the Soviet-era practice
of arresting the relatives of inconvenient people.
The
EU condemned Tuesday’s guilty verdict and said the case against the
two brothers “appears to be politically motivated”. It said the
trial had failed to substantiate the charges against them.
The
Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent 10 years in jail
before he was pardoned last year, dismissed the verdict as Putin’s
revenge for Navalny’s activism.
This sign at the rally to support
the Navalny brothers reads: ‘Free Navalny’.Photograph:
Novoderezhkin Anton/Itar-Tass/Corbis
Khodorkovsky
said in a statement that he was “not even surprised that Putin and
his entourage are capable of vile tricks, deception, forgery and
manipulation. They are not capable of anything else.”
Hugh
Williamson, Europe and central Asia director at Human Rights Watch,
said the sentencing might have been designed to warn off other Putin
critics.
“The
sentence, and the imprisoning of his brother, Oleg Navalny, seems
aimed not only at punishing Alexei Navalny himself and stopping his
anti-corruption work, but also intimidating other critics of the
government,” he said.
“The
Kremlin seems to be telling independent voices to expect a harsher
crackdown in 2015. Many factors point to political motivations in the
case against Alexei and Oleg Navalny.
“By
moving up the verdict, the Russian authorities apparently sought to
diminish planned demonstrations. They also pushed those planning to
protest [against] a guilty verdict to the margins of the law, by
denying them enough time to comply with local regulations.”
UNITED
STATES EMBASSY MOSCOW, RUSSIA
Security
Message for U.S. Citizens: December 30, 2014
Demonstration
Tonight in Moscow at Manezh Square
The
U.S. Embassy in Moscow wishes to advise U.S. citizens of an
unsanctioned protest scheduled to occur tonight, December 30, at
7:00pm in Manezh Square (Манежная площадь). The
protest site is located near Red Square directly behind the State
Museum.
The
protest, organized by supporters of Alexei Navalny, is in response to
today’s verdict in the Navalny vs. Yves Rocher court case. The
reading of the verdict was followed by some violence and a limited
number of arrests. As a result, there are concerns regarding the
potential for violence at tonight’s protest.
According
to the Moscow police, Navalny supporters have not applied for an
official protest permit and officers have been instructed to remove
protesters from Manezh Square. Police officers have already been
deployed to Manezh Square in anticipation of tonight’s protest.
Due
to the possibility of large crowds and violence, Americans should
avoid Manezh Square and the surrounding area including metro stations
for the remainder of the day. The Metro stations in the immediate
area include: Okhotny Ryad, Teatralnaya, and Ploshchad Revolyutsii
(Охотный ряд, Театральная и Площадь
Революции). See the attached map below.
Tonight’s
event may potentially result in further demonstrations near Red
Square or in other areas of Moscow on New Year’s Eve and/or
throughout the extended Russian holidays.
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