French President Emmanuel Macron had a phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the evening of Thursday, August 19.
According to the readout from the Élysée Palace, the two leaders spoke for nearly an hour and a half. Among other things, Macron urged Putin to release jailed opposition politician Alexey Navalny “in accordance with the decision of the European Court of Human Rights.”
Macron also expressed hopes that the Russian State Duma election in September will take place in accordance with the criteria of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
The Kremlin’s readout of the phone conversation between Putin and Macron doesn’t mention that the French president brought up Navalny or Russia’s upcoming parliamentary election.
August 20 marks one year since Alexey Navalny’s near-fatal poisoning with a chemical nerve agent. The opposition politician has said that he holds President Vladimir Putin personally responsible for the attempt on his life. According to an investigation from Bellingcat and The Insider, officers from a secret FSB unit were involved in the poisoning.
Navalny was arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in January 2021, upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from the poisoning attack. In February, a Moscow court revoked his suspended sentence in the “Yves Rocher” case and sentenced him to time in prison. Navalny is now serving a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence. World leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have called on the Russian authorities to release Navalny.
In February 2021, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) demanded that Moscow free Alexey Navalny immediately because of the risk to his life in prison in Russia. In response, the Moscow City Court said that ECHR has no right to give Russian judges “any categorical instructions and interfere in the activities of national courts related to the execution of sentences that have entered into legal force.”