Putin: Jailed Opposition Leader Navalny Got What He Deserved
Voice of America
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny got what he deserved when he was sentenced to prison.
Putin, speaking at a news conference in Geneva after his summit with U.S. President Joe Biden, said, without mentioning Navalny's name, "He deliberately moved [back to Russia] to be arrested." Navalny, Putin's most prominent political foe, was arrested in January when he returned from Germany, where he had been treated at a Berlin hospital for five months while recovering from a poisoning. Navalny contends Russian agents applied the nerve agent Novichok to his underwear in August, a claim Moscow has denied. Then, in February, Navalny was handed a two-and-a-half-year prison term for violating terms of a suspended sentence he had been given after a 2014 embezzlement conviction he has claimed is politically motivated.
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