Russia menaces Alexei Navalny after he exposed its agents' ineptitude

STAY ABROAD or rot in jail. That was the choice Vladimir Putin offered this week to Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician currently in Germany recovering from an attempt by Russian security agents to assassinate him last August. The new threat was delivered by Russia’s federal prison agency, which accused Mr Navalny of violating a probation period imposed as part of a trumped-up embezzlement conviction in 2014. It was an obvious sham: the probation period expired on December 30th, but on December 28th Mr Navalny was ordered to attend a parole hearing in Moscow at 9am the following morning, or trigger a suspended sentence of three and a half years.

The following day, Russian authorities launched a new and larger embezzlement case against Mr Navalny. He remained unfazed. “Putin desperately does not want me to return to Russia,” he told The Economist. “I am planning to do what I always said I would do: come back.”

The prospect of Mr Navalny returning ahead of parliamentary elections in 2021 has worried the Kremlin ever since September, when he emerged from a coma after collapsing during a flight over Siberia in August. He had been evacuated to Berlin, where doctors determined he had been poisoned with novichok, a Russian military nerve agent. Since then he and his allies have been busy. On...