Aleksei Navalny, opposition leader, anti-corruption activist and fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, returned to Russia on January 17 after recovering for five months in Germany from having been poisoned with a military grade nerve agent, Novichok. It was an event widely reported to have been an assassination attempt by Russian state agents.
Upon landing, Navalny was immediately arrested on charges that he had violated the parole terms from a suspended sentence received in 2014 for alleged fraud, a conviction that the European Court of Human Rights ruled was “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable”.
