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Aleksei Navalny Says He’ll Return to Russia on Sunday


MOSCOW — Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who has been in Germany for months recovering from a nerve-agent attack widely seen as carried out by the Russian state, said on Wednesday that he would return to Russia this weekend despite the threat of being jailed on arrival.

Mr. Navalny said in social-media posts that he had bought a ticket for a flight to Moscow this Sunday. His announcement that he will return came just two days after Russia’s prison authority petitioned a court to imprison Mr. Navalny for what it said was violating the terms of an earlier suspended prison sentence.

“They are doing everything they can to scare me,” Mr. Navalny said in an Instagram post on Wednesday, referring to the Russian authorities. “But I don’t much care about what they are doing. Russia is my country, Moscow is my city, and I miss them.”

Mr. Navalny was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent in Siberia in August in what he and Western officials say was an assassination attempt by the Russian government. He fell into a coma, and was flown to Berlin for treatment.

He said on Wednesday that he now believed he was well enough to return to Russia. He bought tickets on the low-cost airline Pobeda, he said, and planned to fly back to Moscow on Sunday.

“Come meet me!” he said.





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