Alexey Navalny’s wife Yulia says she’s under police surveillance
Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of jailed Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, says she’s being followed by the police. She stated this in a Instagram post that included a photo of a vehicle (pictured below), which, according to Navalnaya, has been parked near her home for the past day.
That car has been parked near my house for a day already — it’s operational police officers keeping an eye on me. Well, it’s no surprise — yesterday we saw that they’ve started holding mobile “troika” hearings, now they are persecuting me as the wife of an enemy of the people. The Year of ’37 has come and we didn’t notice.
On Monday, January 18, Alexey Navalny was remanded in custody until February 15 during a hearing at a police station in Khimki. This came after Russia’s prison authorities filed a claim in court seeking to revoke Navalny’s probation in Yves Rocher case and incarcerate him under a reinstated sentence on the grounds that he violated the terms of his probation. Navalny is currently being held in an isolation cell at Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina remand prison.
Read more about Navalny’s case
The Yves Rocher case
In 2014, Alexey Navalny and his brother Oleg were found guilty of embezzlement and laundering funds stolen from two Russian companies associated with the French cosmetics brand “Yves Rocher.” Oleg Navalny was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and Alexey Navalny was given a 3.5-year probation sentence. The brothers pleaded not guilty, calling the case politically motivated. In 2017, the European Court of Human Rights declared the verdicts “unjust” and ordered the Russian authorities to pay the Navalny brothers compensation. Their sentences were never overturned, however.
1937
In Russian, the term “Year of ’37” is used to reference the Great Terror — a Stalin-era campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union.