Navalny support network ordered to stop Russia-wide activities
- Published
A Russian prosecutor has ordered that the network of offices supporting jailed Putin critic Alexei Navalny must suspend all activities across Russia.
The prosecutor also applied to a court to suspend the work of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK).
It is a move to label the groups as "extremist", which would give the authority to jail activists and freeze the groups' bank accounts.
The German government has condemned the move as contrary to the rule of law.
Last week Navalny - Russia's most prominent opposition figure - announced he was ending a hunger strike after 24 days of refusing food in jail. Hours earlier his private doctors had appealed to him to eat to preserve his life and health.
The BBC's Sarah Rainsford in Moscow says that with Navalny now in a penal colony east of the city, authorities are moving to close down all his team's activities.
Some of his supporters have been planning to run in parliamentary elections in September.
His team has condemned the prosecutor's move as an attempt to destroy peaceful political opposition in Russia, our correspondent reports. They say they are now figuring out how to go on operating - but admit it is too dangerous to defy this suspension openly.
The Kremlin spokesman declined to comment.
President Vladimir Putin's foremost critic, Navalny was detained as soon as he returned to Russia in January, after receiving treatment in Berlin for a nerve agent attack in Siberia that left him in a coma and fighting for his life.
The Kremlin denied any involvement in the attack, but last December Navalny tricked an FSB state security agent into revealing that Novichok - a Russian weapons-grade toxin - had been placed in his underpants.
In February Navalny was sent to a penal colony in the Vladimir region, about 60 miles (100 km) east of Moscow, for over two and a half years. A court ruled he had broken the terms of a suspended jail term while in Berlin, even though he had been in a coma.
Russia rejected a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights that he should be freed because his life was at risk.