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Billy McFarland Is Out of Jail and Prepared for His Subsequent Transfer

Billy McFarland Is Out of Jail and Ready for His Next Move

“Is this technically Dumbo?” Billy McFarland asked, walking toward the East River shoreline. “It’s super cool. Are the rents here crazy too?

“I never spent much time in Brooklyn, until the Brooklyn detention center,” he continued. “I was always like, ‘I’m never going to live in Brooklyn.’ Now, I think it’s kind of nice.”

Mr. McFarland, who in 2018 entered guilty pleas for fraud stemming from his role in organizing the Fyre Festival — a Coachella-for-the-Bahamas affair that went spectacularly awry and established him as the Elizabeth Holmes of party promoters— had been a free man for all of 15 minutes. And he didn’t seem inclined to lay low after spending close to four years in prison, plus another six months of additional confinement.

Moments after removing an electronic ankle monitor at the Gold Street halfway house where he had stayed earlier this year, he was posing for a New York Times photographer and talking to a reporter whom he’d approached toward the end of his confinement with the help of a publicist.

“I thought it was going to be a big process, but it turns out they just hand you scissors and you cut it off,” said Mr. McFarland, 30, who is 6-foot-3 and post-prison lean. He was wearing a dark T-shirt and navy pants that he said were from Uniqlo. On his feet were Gianvito Rossi sneakers that looked like Converse All Stars, but retail for around $700.

Mr. McFarland — who has little money in the bank, around $26 million in financial amends to make and no immediate job prospects — said he had purchased the shoes before his legal problems.

“Friends joke that my entire wardrobe is from 2016,” he said.

Back then, Mr. McFarland — who grew up in Short Hills, N.J., and dropped out of Bucknell University after less than a year — was known as the founder of a company called Magnises, whose flagship charge card was pitched as a kind of American Express Black card for millennials.

Mostly, those who joined were given access to an open bar at a Greenwich Village townhouse where he held parties. Another membership perk: Bahamian excursions, including to Norman’s Cay, a small island that once served as a hub for the Medellín Cartel’s cocaine-smuggling operation.

That was the site Mr. McFarland had selected to hold an epic coming-out festival for his next invention, Fyre, an Uber-like app through which people could book their favorite celebrities for special events. He enlisted Ja Rule, Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski to help promote the 2017 party, which featured more than 30 musical guests, including Blink-182 and Tyga. Tickets cost up to $12,000.

But the Fyre Festival — which would go on to achieve cultural notoriety, if not for the reasons Mr. McFarland had intended — was poorly planned, and its finances were a mess.

The night before the first attendees arrived on the island, an intense rainstorm hit.

People showed up to find that the “luxury villas” that came with their ticket packages were, in fact, disaster relief tents located on a makeshift camping ground.

And the “uniquely authentic island cuisine” guests were promised in promotional materials turned out to be cheese sandwiches served in plastic foam containers, though Mr. McFarland countered in our interview last week that reports of the meals had been vastly overblown.

“There’s a reason there’s only one photograph of that,” he said, referring to a viral shot of a sad pile of lettuce topped by two tomato slices, above two slices of prepackaged cheese serving as a sort of garnish for two slices of untoasted wheat bread.

Ultimately, the event — which stranded thousands of attendees in the Bahamas and left them scrounging for makeshift shelter on a dark beach — was scrapped without a single performance taking place. Less than two months later, Mr. McFarland was arrested and charged with fraud.

“They took me to the Brooklyn detention center for one night,” he said. “My head was swirling with all these things, and I panicked like, ‘I need to pay everybody back tomorrow or else this is real.’”

Class-action lawsuits followed.

While on probation, Mr. McFarland launched a V.I.P. ticket service that promised users tickets he didn’t have to events including the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” the Victoria’s Secret fashion show and the Met Gala.

There was another round of fraud charges.

“I probably added years on to my sentence by doing that,” he said. “I just was making bad decision after bad decision.”

By the water in Dumbo, Mr. McFarland struck a few plaintive poses. “I can’t wait to go swimming,” he said.

He then took an Uber to his small second-floor apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

On the curb outside his new building, he continued to speak of the borough with tourist-like wonder. “Was this street terrible years ago?” he asked. “Because there are all these nice new buildings.” (Before the Fyre Festival, Mr. McFarland had lived in the meatpacking district. “I was 21 when I moved there — cut me some slack,” he said.)

With characteristic vagueness, Mr. McFarland said the rent for his new place was being paid by “family and friends.” He did not say whether that included his parents, Steven and Irene McFarland, who are real estate developers based in New Jersey.

It had taken a lot, Mr. McFarland said, for his parents to understand that “someone they were so close to was capable of lying like I did.” He continued, “I hurt them, and it sucks.”

Had he personally apologized to his victims? “No,” he said, then posed a question of his own:

“What would you say to them if you were me?”

The terms of Mr. McFarland’s six-month house arrest allowed him to go outside only to go to the grocery store or the gym. He chose a membership at Blink Fitness, which he paid for with a debit card. “I don’t think I can get a credit card,” he said.

His new apartment was Airbnb-neutral. The only decorations were a few plants he’d picked up at Trader Joe’s — a bird of paradise, two money trees — along with a white board that was blank as the decor. The bed was perfectly made, the floor immaculate.

The work of a cleaning service? “You’re never going to believe it,” he said. “I learned how to do it!”

As Mr. McFarland recalled it, his housekeeping education began at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he was first held, then continued at the Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where he was transferred in early 2019. “It was like Danbury,” he said, referring to the less hard-line cushy-by-prison standards facility where Martha Stewart did her time. “But I messed it up.”

Guards confiscated the drive and Mr. McFarland spent three months in solitary confinement, where he said he fell asleep to the sounds of a screaming gang member known as the White Tiger, so named because of tattoos of the animal that covered his face and other areas of his body.

After that, he was resettled at FCI Elkton, a low-security federal correctional institution located in Ohio.

Then, in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic hit. Mr. McFarland appealed for compassionate release, claiming that allergies and asthma placed him in a high risk category for health complications. His efforts were unsuccessful. “Hope clouds your judgment,” he said. “There was no way I was going to get out.”

Ultimately, prison records show, Mr. McFarland spent six months there, though the records do not specify why. His lawyer, Jason Russo, said in a phone interview that he had written letters to prison officials attempting to get Mr. McFarland out of solitary confinement, only to be stonewalled at every turn. Mr. Russo said he could not even get a specific answer as to why Mr. McFarland was there for such an extended period of time. Emails and phone calls to the prison by the New York Times were not returned.

Mr. McFarland read a lot during those months. “There was nothing else to do,” he said.

One of the books he finished was Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.” Another was Gregory David Roberts’s novel “Shantarum.”

“It’s about an Australian who breaks out of jail and joins the Indian mafia,” said Mr. McFarland. “Really cool.”

In Mr. McFarland’s Bedford-Stuyvesant living room, on a small shelf by the gray couch from Wayfair — “A friend bought it for me,” he said, “I couldn’t afford it” — were copies of Don Winslow’s “City on Fire” and Sebastian Mallaby’s “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the Future.”

But Mr. McFarland said hadn’t been doing as much reading since he began home confinement and acquired a Mac desktop computer with a Westinghouse screen. “I just missed the computer so much,” said Mr. McFarland. “I missed that more than anything.”

As part of his plea, Mr. McFarland is barred for life from serving as a director of a public company. His earnings will be garnished until he pays back the full amount he owes his victims, more than $25 million.

“Obviously, he’s got a lot of work ahead of him,” Mr. Russo said.

At least for now, Mr. McFarland has abandoned the idea of writing his memoir.

“The book’s not going to pay the restitution, let me put it that way,” he said.

So what will?

“I’d like to do something tech-based,” he said a few minutes later, walking to BKLYN Blend, where he ordered an egg sandwich and a coffee. “The good thing with tech is that people are so forward-thinking, and they’re more apt at taking risk.

“If I worked in finance, I think it would be harder to get back,” he continued. “Tech is more open. And the way I failed is totally wrong, but in a certain sense, failure is OK in entrepreneurship.”

Seated at a quiet table in the corner — no one at the coffee shop appeared to recognize him — Mr. McFarland mulled whether he’d prefer to work for himself or someone else. “At the end of the day, I think I could probably create the most value by building some sort of tech product,” he said. “Whether that’s within a company or by starting my own company, I’m open to both. I’ll probably decide in the next couple of weeks which path to go do.”

He said he was “not particularly interested in crypto,” though he would make an exception for the latest frontier in blockchain technology, decentralized autonomous organizations, which he said were “allowing people to come together online to effect real world change in a way they previously couldn’t, taking people to places they couldn’t get to — and, once they’re there, enabling them to effect real-world change.”

In April 2020, while in prison, Mr. McFarland made his first foray into philanthropy. He led a drive called Project 315, which raised money to cover the costs of calls between underprivileged inmates and their families. Four days after the project’s Instagram launch, fees were waived nationwide. “We did it,” the Instagram account associated with Mr. McFarland’s “non profit organization” said, claiming credit. (In fact, the suspension of fees came after campaigning by Senator Amy Klobuchar and a group of other Democratic senators that had begun well before Mr. McFarland got the idea.)

But it whetted his appetite for good works, he said. Now, Mr. McFarland is talking about forming a charity that would pay travel costs for the families of prisoners.

“I met some really amazing people in prison,” he said. “Half the people are just naturally bad and the other half are great.” (Mr. McFarland hedged, when asked which group he belonged to. “But I think I’m a better person than I was four years ago,” he said.)

Mr. McFarland said he wanted people to know that he was sorry for what went wrong with the festival and for his actions. “I deserved my sentence,” he said. “I let a lot of people down.”

He attributed his choices in part to “immaturity” and hubris.

“I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” he said.

Partly, he blamed the tech world — the very same world he was musing about re-entering — which he said sometimes operates by an “ends justify the means” ethos.

Still, he took some issue with news articles that compared him to Bernie Madoff; he wasn’t running a decades-long scheme to defraud people of their life savings, after all. Plus, he said, he hadn’t planned for things to end up the way they did.

Much was made in both the Hulu and Netflix documentaries about the local workers in the Bahamas who were stiffed when the festival was canceled and debts piled up.

Mr. McFarland argued that this characterization was somewhat misleading because, he said, most of them were working on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis, and therefore suffered limited losses. (One restaurant owner said in the Netflix documentary that she spent $50,000 of her savings preparing for the festival and received no compensation from organizers. In May 2017, she told The New York Times that she was owed $134,000.)

Two of his former Bahamian employees traveled to New York for a post-house-arrest party Mr. McFarland hosted on the evening of his release at Marylou, a French bistro in the East Village.

Ozzy Rolle, Mr. McFarland’s principle consigliere in the Exumas, an island district in the Bahamas, said the following afternoon that he’d been paid almost everything he was owed for the festival, before it imploded. “I was treated good. Probably a week I wasn’t paid for.” He even went as far as to say the Fyre Festival had been good for tourism in the Bahamas. “So many people came after reading about what happened,” he said.

But Scooter Rolle, his cousin and travel companion, said he had yet to get a dime of what he was owed for his work, in the days before Fyre. “I came to clarify things,” he said.

That didn’t exactly happen, but Mr. McFarland did buy him a post-party lobster roll at Sarabeth’s Kitchen. “Billy tried his best,” he said.

Back at the Bed-Stuy cafe, Mr. McFarland said the biggest sin he had committed was digging himself in deeper with dishonesty.

“I lied,” he said. “I think I was scared. And the fear was letting down people who believed in me — showing them they weren’t right.”

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In First Interview From Jail, an Upbeat Navalny Discusses Jail Life

In First Interview From Jail, an Upbeat Navalny Discusses Prison Life

MOSCOW — Russia’s most famous prisoner, the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, spends much of his time tidying his cellblock, reading letters and visiting the mess for meals, with porridge often on the menu.

But perhaps the most maddening thing, he suggested, is being forced to watch Russian state TV and selected propaganda films for more than eight hours a day in what the authorities call an “awareness raising” program that has replaced hard labor for political prisoners.

“Reading, writing or doing anything else” is prohibited, Mr. Navalny said of the forced screen time. “You have to sit in a chair and watch TV.” And if an inmate nods off, he said, the guards shout, “Don’t sleep, watch!”

In an interview with The New York Times, his first with a news organization since his arrest in January, Mr. Navalny talked about his life in prison, about why Russia has cracked down so hard on the opposition and dissidents, and about his conviction that “Putin’s regime,” as he calls it, is doomed to collapse.

Mr. Navalny started a major opposition movement to expose high-level corruption and challenge President Vladimir V. Putin at the polls. He was imprisoned in March after he returned to Russia from Germany knowing he was facing a parole violation for a conviction in a case seen as politically motivated. As was well chronicled at the time, he was out of the country to receive medical treatment after being poisoned by Russian agents with the chemical weapon Novichok, according to Western governments.

Mr. Navalny has not been entirely mute since his incarceration in Penal Colony No. 2, just east of Moscow. Through his lawyers, who visit him regularly, he has sent out occasional social media posts.

Nor is he being actively muzzled by the Kremlin. When asked about Mr. Navalny’s social media presence on Tuesday, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said that it was “not our business” if Mr. Navalny spoke out.

But the written exchange of questions and answers covering 54 handwritten pages is by far his most comprehensive and wide-ranging account.

In today’s Russia, Mr. Navalny made clear, hours spent watching state television and movies chosen by the warden are the experience of a political prisoner, a status Amnesty International has assigned to Mr. Navalny. Gone are the shifts of heavy labor in mining or forestry and the harrying by criminals and guards alike that was the hallmark of the Soviet gulag for political prisoners.

“You might imagine tattooed muscle men with steel teeth carrying on with knife fights to take the best cot by the window,” Mr. Navalny said. “You need to imagine something like a Chinese labor camp, where everybody marches in a line and where video cameras are hung everywhere. There is constant control and a culture of snitching.”

Despite his circumstances, Mr. Navalny was upbeat about Russia’s future prospects, and he outlined his strategy for achieving political change through the electoral system even in an authoritarian state.

“The Putin regime is an historical accident, not an inevitability,” he wrote, adding, “It was the choice of the corrupt Yeltsin family,” a reference to former President Boris N. Yeltsin’s appointment of Mr. Putin as acting president in December 1999. “Sooner or later, this mistake will be fixed, and Russia will move on to a democratic, European path of development. Simply because that is what the people want.”

As he has before, Mr. Navalny criticized Europe and the United States for the economic sanctions it has imposed on Russia for its meddling abroad and its repression of dissidents, including Mr. Navalny. He said sanctions harmed ordinary Russians and risked alienating a broad constituency inside Russia that is a natural ally.

Sanctions, he said, should target only the top oligarchs who prop up Mr. Putin’s government, instead of the dozens of largely obscure figures who have been hit so far. The truly powerful have largely avoided sanctions, he said, by retaining “an army of lawyers, lobbyists and bankers, fighting for the right of owners of dirty and bloody money to remain unpunished.”

Through the 20th century and earlier, prison in Russia was a crucible that forged or broke dissidents and writers, molded leaders and crushed pluralistic politics.

The modern experience of a Russian political prisoner, Mr. Navalny said, is mostly “psychological violence,” with mind-numbing screen time playing a big role.

Mr. Navalny described five daily sessions of television watching for inmates, the first starting immediately after morning calisthenics, breakfast and sweeping the yard.

After some free time, there’s a two-hour spell in front of the screen, lunch, then more screen time, dinner, and then more TV time in the evening. During one afternoon session, playing chess or backgammon is an acceptable alternative.

“We watch films about the Great Patriotic War,” Mr. Navalny said, referring to World War II, “or how one day, 40 years ago, our athletes defeated the Americans or Canadians.”

During these sessions, he said, “I most clearly understand the essence of the ideology of the Putin regime: The present and the future are being substituted with the past — the truly heroic past, or embellished past, or completely fictional past. All sorts of past must constantly be in the spotlight to displace thoughts about the future and questions about the present.”

The approach of lengthy, enforced television watching, while taken to extremes at Penal Colony No. 2, is not unique to the site, where inmates in politically hued cases have been incarcerated before.

It sprang from a penal reform in Russia begun in 2010 to boost guards’ control over inmates through their day and to reduce the sway of prison gangs. The intent is not so much brainwashing as control, experts on the Russian prison system say.

“Everything is organized so that I am under maximum control 24 hours a day,” Mr. Navalny said. He said he had not been assaulted or threatened by fellow inmates but estimated that about one-third were what are known in Russian prisons as “activists,” those who serve as informants to the warden.

During his first weeks in the penal colony, Mr. Navalny’s limbs numbed, either from lingering effects of the poisoning or from a back injury from riding in a prison van. He also went on a 24-day hunger strike, raising alarms about his health.

His neurological symptoms eased when guards stopped waking him hourly at night, ostensibly to ensure he wasn’t plotting an escape.

“I now understand why sleep deprivation is one of the favorite tortures of the special services,” he said. “No traces remain, and it’s impossible to tolerate.”

He said he gets along well with other inmates, and that they sometimes cook snacks in a microwave.

“When we cook, I always remember the classic scene from ‘Goodfellas’ when the mafia bosses cook pasta in a prison cell,” he said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have such a cool pot, and pasta is forbidden. Still, it’s fun.”

Mr. Navalny, 45, conceded that he has struggled to remain visible in Russian politics through a tumultuous period as the government has clamped down on the opposition and the news media.

The protests that erupted after disputed Belarusian elections last year spooked the Kremlin, he suggested. The Putin government’s other worry, he said, was the electoral strategy he has devised and calls “smart voting.”

Under the strategy, Mr. Navalny’s organization endorses the candidates it thinks have a chance of winning in regional and parliamentary elections, which will be held next month.

The Kremlin was so concerned about the upcoming elections, he said, that it engineered a crackdown this year not just on his group and other activists but on moderate opposition politicians, civil society groups and independent news media outlets like Meduza, Proekt and Dozhd television.

Mr. Navalny suggested that while the crackdown may prove to be a tactical success for Mr. Putin, it may also be a long-term liability.

“Putin solved his tactical question: not allowing us to take away the majority in the Duma,” Mr. Navalny said, speaking of the Russian Parliament’s lower house. “But to achieve this, he had to completely change the political system, to shift to a principally different, far harsher level of authoritarianism.”

Mr. Navalny suggested the move underscored a principal weakness of Mr. Putin’s political system. While leftists and nationalists are represented by parties loyal to Mr. Putin, there is no stable, pro-Kremlin center-right party representing the country’s emerging middle class of relatively prosperous, city-dwelling Russians.

“Opposition exists in Russia not because Aleksei Navalny or somebody else commands it from a headquarters,” Mr. Navalny said, “but because about 30 percent of the country — mostly the educated, urban population — doesn’t have political representation.”

When what he called the reactionary anomaly of Mr. Putin’s rule fades, Russia will revert to democratic governance, Mr. Navalny said. “We are specific, like any nation, but we are Europe. We are the West.”

Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting from Washington.

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Russia Doesn’t Ship U.S. Investor to Jail however Nonetheless Sends a Warning

Russia Doesn’t Send U.S. Investor to Jail but Still Sends a Warning

MOSCOW – A Russian court on Friday sentenced an American businessman, who is one of the country’s most prominent foreign investors, to five and a half years suspended sentence in a penal colony for embezzlement conviction, undermining Russia’s ability to attract foreign investment.

The suspended sentence for businessman Michael Calvey, founder of Baring Vostok, a private equity firm with $ 3.7 billion in assets under management, means he has no time in Russia’s notoriously harsh penal colony system, the successor to the Gulag Camp, unless he is in breach of probation.

However, the risk of jail time that Mr Calvey and his six co-defendants still face in the case was expected to dampen foreign interest in doing business in Russia, where FDI is already hampered by weak property rights and Western sanctions.

The ruling became all the more worrying for business leaders when, despite deteriorating ties with the West, Calvey had consistently advocated investment in Russia despite many companies pulling out of the country.

Mr. Calvey, 53, founded Baring Vostok in the 1990s, shortly after the collapse of communism, with the aim of bringing investors into Russia’s newly capitalist economy. In its 27 years in business, the company has attracted billions of dollars in private equity capital for Russian companies like Yandex, a search engine that competes locally with Google, and Ozon, an online retailer.

The co-defendants, including Philippe Delpal, a French national and senior executive at Baring Vostok, received similar suspended sentences in the Russian prison system.

The case arose out of a business dispute with shareholders in a Siberian bank.

Prosecutors said Mr. Calvey and other executives of his fund embezzled 2.5 billion rubles (about $ 34 million) by persuading the bank’s shareholders, Vostochny Bank, to inflate a stake in another company Accept price.

In his defense, Mr. Calvey argued that the bank’s shareholders had full access to information about the value of the shares when they accepted them in lieu of repaying a loan and that the case should also have been resolved through commercial arbitration.

“I came to Russia and stayed here because I loved this country from the start and believed that Russia had the potential to become one of the world’s leading investment markets,” Calvey said in a closing statement at his trial last month .

“I convinced investors to share my confidence in Russia’s future,” he said. “Even after 2014, when the geopolitical climate deteriorated and sanctions were imposed on Russia, I continued to defend Russia’s image as an attractive country to work and invest in.”

Calvey’s investment drive continued despite two decades of corporate government takeovers, ruble devaluations, and politically tinged arrests, including Sergei L. Magnitsky, who died on custody and worked as an attorney for another prominent foreign investor, William F. Browser.

Russia’s once richest man, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the founder of an oil company, was convicted twice and sentenced to long prison terms in the penal colonies.

The conditions there are tough. In a prison, Mr. Khodorkovsky was stabbed in the face with a homemade knife. The guard said another detainee was blocking unwanted sexual advances, which Mr. Khodorkovsky denied.

Mr. Calvey’s investment firm had focused on internet and retail start-ups that benefited from the riches of the petroleum industry and successfully served the country’s emerging middle class.

The arrest and detention of Mr Calvey and his colleagues in 2019 raised fears that executives at other American companies might be similarly arrested in a climate of strained relations with the United States. The seven executives were convicted by a Russian court on Thursday and sentenced on Friday.

During his detention, Mr. Calvey continued to speak out in favor of the investment case for Russia and read statements about it at hearings from the aquarium in which defendants are being held in Russian courts.

Russian entrepreneurs are often the target of market shakes and shadowy plans to steal assets, said Russia’s own corporate ombudsman. Arrests are common. Today, around one in ten prisoners in Russia’s penal colonies are white-collar criminals.

Government revenues from commodity exports such as oil and natural gas, which flow regardless of what Russian courts do in the country, have left the country’s investment climate largely unconcerned, economists noted. And an independent judicial system that would help investors could also weaken control over the political opposition.

“Russia is in what could be described as an investment pause,” said Natalia Akindinova, a researcher at the Higher School of Economics, in an interview.

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Educational Going through Jail in Iran Escapes to U.Ok.

Academic Facing Jail in Iran Escapes to U.K.

Mr Ahmady said he was held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison north of Tehran for three months after his arrest in 2019 and blindfolded on repeated interrogations. The detention was so excruciating that he longed to be interrogated, as it was the only form of human contact he received.

“You will only be mentally retarded and insensitive to your surroundings,” Ahmady told the British broadcaster Channel 4.

Mr. Ahmady, who is of Kurdish descent, was born in northwestern Iran and obtained British citizenship in the 1990s. He has published several reports and books on genital cuts and child marriage in Iran. In a report published in 2015, he wrote that genital cutting was “embedded in the social fabric of Iranian culture” in at least four provinces.

“I know for a fact that my sentence is a tool for the Iranian security services and the Ministry of Justice to intimidate and pressure the few remaining people who work on social issues,” Ahmady said in the statement released on Wednesday its website was published.

According to local reports in December, Tehran prosecutors accused him of collaborating with the United States and others, which he denied.

More than half a dozen foreigners and dual nationals are held in Iranian prisons, including Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe; Fariba Adelkhah, a Franco-Iranian academic; Siamak Namazi, a businessman, and his father, Baquer Namazi, a former Unicef ​​official, both Iranian-American; Dr. Ahmad Reza Jalali, a Swedish-Iranian doctor and researcher; Nahid Taghavi, a German-Iranian architect; and Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian-American environmentalist.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a British-Australian scholar arrested in 2018 for spying for Israel, was released in December in a prisoner swap with three Iranian men.

Farnaz Fassihi contributed to the coverage.

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Russian Court docket Orders Aleksei Navalny Saved in Jail

Russian Court Orders Aleksei Navalny Kept in Jail

“If they really wanted to, they would most likely have got it,” Putin said.

Despite the Kremlin sacking Mr Navalny and his supporters as part of As a misguided minority, the opposition leader has shown that he can attract the attention of millions of people in Russia.

Shortly after returning to Moscow, Mr Navalny’s team published an investigation describing a secret palace on the shores of the Black Sea allegedly built for Mr Putin and paid for by state-owned companies. Navalny’s ally Lyubov Sobol said the video version of the investigation was viewed by more than 100 million people on YouTube, with 70 percent viewing from Russia. On Monday, Mr Putin denied Mr Navalny’s allegations and called the video investigation “boring”.

While he was in prison, Mr. Navalny was dragged out of daily political life in his cell, said Olga Mikhailova, his lawyer. For example, he was unaware that several members of his team had been arrested and that his home had been ransacked by the police.

According to OVD-Info, an activist group tracking arrests during protests, Russian authorities arrested more than 4,000 people across the country last week in protests demanding the release of Mr Navalny. At least seven criminal cases against protesters have opened, Moscow police said in a statement, warning people not to participate in protests that have not been sanctioned.

When his supporters are under increasing pressure from the authorities and speak on the video link from prison on Thursday, Mr Navalny tries to lift their spirits.

“They are not and never will be masters of our country,” said Navalny, referring to Mr. Puting and his government. “Lots of people, tens of millions, agree with me,” he said. “And we will never allow these people to conquer and rob our country.”