MOSCOW: Opposition leader Alexei Navalny said on Wednesday he plans to return to Russia on Sunday from Germany, where he has been recovering from a poisoning attack, despite facing a threat of jail.
The 44-year-old Kremlin critic wrote on Instagram that he had booked a flight that will arrive in Moscow on January 17.
“There was never any question of ‘returning or not’ for me. Simply because I didn’t leave. I ended up in Germany... for one reason: they tried to kill me,” the anti-graft campaigner wrote on Instagram.
Navalny has been in Germany since late August after he fell violently ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow and was hospitalised in the city of Omsk. He was then flown out to Berlin in an induced coma.
Western experts concluded that Navalny was poisoned using the Soviet-designed nerve agent Novichok, the same chemical said to be used in the attempted murder of former spy Sergei Skripal in the English town of Salisbury in 2018. Navalny insists the attack was carried out by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
