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#FreeNavalny Supporters rally in cities around the world one year after Alexey Navalny was arrested upon returning to Russia

2:35 pm, January 17, 2022

On January 17, 2021, Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny was arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport immediately upon returning to Russia from Germany, where he had spent months recovering from a near-fatal poisoning. Navalny would go on to spend the next year behind bars, first in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina remand prison and then in a prison colony in the Vladimir region, where he is still in custody today. The Kremlin critic was incarcerated under a reinstated sentence after Russia’s Penitentiary Service accused him of parole violations. Navalny was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but given the number of ongoing criminal cases against him, the opposition leader says he’s not counting the days until his release. To mark the anniversary of Alexey Navalny’s arrest, his supporters rallied in dozens of cities around the world to call for his freedom. Here’s what the rallies looked like from Moscow to Miami.