Russia’s regime is weakened by putting Alexei Navalny in jail

JUDGING BY THE security measures, you would have thought Moscow was experiencing a terrorist attack. Police in riot gear surrounded the capital’s main court and blocked the approaches. Muscovites suspected of being protesters were whisked away and bundled into police vans. By lunchtime 350 people, including journalists, had been detained, adding to nearly 2,000 arrested during protests two days earlier. Jails and detention centres filled up so fast that many demonstrators were held in police vans in freezing temperatures without food or water for up to 40 hours.The reason for the mass arrests was Alexei Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader, who had returned last month from Germany, where he had been treated for poisoning, ordered, he says, by President Vladimir Putin himself. On February 2nd Mr Navalny was put in a glass cage inside the Moscow court and sentenced to nearly three years in prison. This converted the original, suspended, sentence handed down in 2014 into a trumped-up case designed to stop him from standing for election. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg had previously exonerated him of that charge and made Russia pay him compensation.