On February 2, 2021, Moscow’s Simonovsky District Court, in an off-site hearing held at the Moscow City Court, replaced Alexei Navalny’s suspended sentence in the Yves Rocher case with a real prison term. The formal pretext was the Federal Penitentiary Service’s claim that Navalny had allegedly violated the terms of his suspended sentence, even though at the time he was undergoing treatment and rehabilitation in Germany after being poisoned with Novichok (a Soviet-developed nerve agent). The court sentenced him to 3.5 years in a penal colony, counting the time he had already spent under house arrest. The Russian authorities feared Navalny’s return to Russia and therefore deprived him of his freedom.
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