A Navalny activist convicted of hitting a cop goes free from jail after eight months

Konstantin Saltykov, an activist in Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption movement, was sentenced to 10 months in prison by Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court on Monday for attacking a police officer at a protest on January 28, and was then promptly released, having served almost eight months in pretrial detention. (Saltykov owes his early release to a new federal law that weighs one day of pretrial detention as 1.5 days of standard imprisonment.)

Saltykov was arrested alongside Alexey Navalny, who months later was sentenced to 30 days in jail for staging the rally without a permit from city officials. Saltykov’s scuffle with police, incidentally, was caught on video. Watch it for yourself and decide if the clash warranted a 10-month prison sentence.