Western diplomats replaced Maidan activists in the court in the Navalny case

The Moscow City Court is today considering the case of replacing the suspended sentence with a real one (under the article “fraud”) for opposition blogger Alexei Navalny.

The opposition failed to organize massive support for Navalny from the “popular masses,” although the blogger’s comrade Leonid Volkov the day before rudely interrupted the host of the liberal Dozhd TV channel, who was trying to reprimand him, and openly called on supporters to go to the court for an unauthorized rally.

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In reality, several hundred people came to court, of whom 200 were detained.

The police cut people off even at the metro, which created problems for ordinary citizens going to work.

The townsfolk mercilessly fired at Navalny into the microphones of the same “Dozhd”.

But the collective West showed massive support for the opposition blogger. Representatives of 20 diplomatic missions arrived at the trial. Moreover, they behaved like masters of the situation, expressing protest due to the lack of translation into foreign languages ​​in the Moscow City Court.

“The question of which country’s citizen is being tried today does not seem abstract to me. And in general, the court should clarify this issue,” HSE professor Dmitry Evstafiev commented on the diplomats’ manifestation.

Russian Foreign Ministry Speaker Maria Zakharova reminded on her Facebook that diplomats traditionally support their citizens in foreign courts.

“Even if Westerners view Navalny as “one of their own,” he is a citizen of the Russian Federation. This is no longer just interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. This is a self-exposure of the unsightly and illegal role of the collective West in attempts to contain Russia.

Or is this an attempt to put psychological pressure on the judge? It is possible that they are largely concerned about the fate of NATO (for example, British and American) millions pumped into illegal activities on Russian territory - they will have to write reports to the capitals about what they spent on,” Zakharova wrote.

Pressure on Russia in connection with the Navalny case also occurred outside the court. Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde, before negotiations in Moscow with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, told him how she once spilled coffee on Alexei Navalny. Lavrov responded by calling the Swedish minister a “dangerous woman.”

Later, at a joint press conference, Lavrov said that Russia has every reason to believe that the situation with Navalny is a staging, since Germany does not provide any evidence of poisoning.

“If you accuse, then prove your guilt. And if you say, I won’t tell you anything, because it’s secret, or because the patient himself doesn’t allow it, then we have every reason to believe that this is a staging,” Lavrov said.

It is expected that pressure on Russia will continue after the trial is over, since from February 4 to 6, the head of EU diplomacy, Josep Borel, will be in Moscow, who has already requested a meeting with Navalny. Press Secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov announced an adequate response to any “hard message” from the European Union. He stressed that the decision on a possible meeting between a Western diplomat and a blogger remains at the discretion of judges or investigators.

“The West is preparing a platform for anti-Russian sanctions. Hence this significant concern. Otherwise, all the world’s diplomats don’t care about Navalny’s fate. He was used and abandoned,” journalist Roman Golovanov commented on the situation in his Telegram channel.