Maybe you could get a meal....
"Russian opposition figure is given house arrest; Prosecution seen by many as move to silence critic" by Andrew Roth | New York Times, March 01, 2014
Will he be able to leave the house like little Miss Hess?
MOSCOW — Alexei A. Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition figure, was placed under house arrest on Friday and ordered not to use the Internet or telephone for two months, thus removing President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critic from public life.
In his verdict, Judge Artur Karpov of Basmany Court in Moscow ruled that Navalny had violated the terms of a travel ban from a pending criminal case accusing him of defrauding a local branch of cosmetics producer Yves Rocher of more than $500,000.
The stiff restrictions in what is widely seen as a politically charged prosecution will effectively muzzle Navalny, the blogger-turned-politician who has used social media to trumpet mass demonstrations against the Kremlin and release damning profiles of corrupt practices in government bids, the most recent asserting that billions of dollars were stolen in the preparations for the Sochi Olympics.
“Their only goal is to stop my political activities,” Navalny told Karpov in front of a packed courtroom. “They want to stop me from coordinating our anti-corruption investigations.”
The ruling, which also prohibits Navalny from speaking with the news media or accepting visitors other than close family members, capped a week in which the Russian authorities showed a renewed will to disrupt demonstrations, detain large numbers of people, and hand down tough sentences to curtail internal dissent since the conclusion of the Winter Games on Sunday.
I'm sick of the Russia-bashing by my jew$media, sorry.
In the months before the games, Putin gave amnesty to several of Russia’s most prominent prisoners, including a former oligarch, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, and two members of the punk protest group Pussy Riot, in what was seen as a nod to international criticism of their prosecutions.
With the games over, the Kremlin has taken its most decisive step yet to silence Navalny as it continues to dampen the mood of protest that erupted two years ago.
“It is easy to see that with the Olympics over, there’s no need to put up a kind face for anyone anymore,” Sergei Nikitin, the head of the Russian branch of Amnesty International, said in a telephone interview Friday. “We are all witnesses to Russia’s growing pressure on any kind of independent opinion.”
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Navalny was convicted in July in a separate embezzlement case and sentenced to five years in prison. He was freed the next day on appeal and allowed to run for mayor of Moscow. At the time, his candidacy seemed to suit the Kremlin’s political goals by helping to portray the election as a genuine and hard-fought victory by the incumbent, Sergei S. Sobyanin, an ally of Putin’s.
A State Department report released Friday criticized Russia for Navalny’s prosecution, citing it as one where “officials denied due process in politically motivated cases....”
In other words, it was like a Gitmo situation.
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Also see: Filipoving Up My Olympics Coverage
Now my Russian coverage is also up-to-date.
