Moscow: The Russian Foreign Ministry today asked the West to avoid intervening in the internal affairs of this country and criticized the manipulation of information related to the case of the opposition Alexei Navalny, Prensa Latina reports.
In statements to the RBK network, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson, María Zajárova, denounced “attempts to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign State” and to misrepresent events for political reasons.
This day, the Simonovsky District Court in Moscow sentenced Navalny to three and a half years in prison, enforcing a suspended sentence in 2014.
According to the court, the defense has 10 days to appeal and the actual penalty is two years and eight months, since the time the blogger was imprisoned is taken into account.
On December 29, the spokeswoman for the Russian Investigative Committee, Svetlana Petrenko, confirmed that that body gathered enough evidence to charge Navalny and his collaborators with large-scale embezzlement.
For this reason, the opponent was arrested on January 17 of this year after his return to this capital from Germany, where he recovered from an alleged poisoning with a neurotoxin, for which he accused the Russian Government.
The case fueled a strong campaign against Russia in the West, which included the presentation of this country as a threat to peace in Europe, which could justify the possible increase in the presence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) near its borders.
The Kremlin rejects the accusations about his alleged involvement in the case, as well as the use of a weapon of war prohibited by international conventions to allegedly poison Navalny.
