MOSCOW, December 17. /TASS/. The issue of pardoning convicted blogger Alexey Navalny, if it emerges, will be resolved according to legal procedures, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with RTVI.
"Listen, I don’t know," he said in response to a question on the possibility of Navalny’s pardon and his future life abroad. "This is the prerogative of a convict serving time, the commission, first at a colony, then in the region, then the central one, then the head of state. There is a certain order defined by the law: the convict submits a petition, he says that he admits guilt, which guilt he admits, and then it follows a chain [of events], the way the law prescribes it," the Kremlin official explained.
Navalny, who received two suspended sentences over the Yves Rocher case, was declared wanted for numerous violations of the terms of his suspended sentence. On January 17, he was detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport having arrived from Berlin. On February 2, Moscow’s Simonovsky District Court converted Alexey Navalny’s suspended sentence to 3 years and 6 months in a medium-security prison.