Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany called for the immediate release of Mr. Navalny and for Russia to examine the causes of his poisoning, her spokesman said. In the United States, both the departing and incoming administrations also called for Mr. Navalny’s release, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo writing that “confident political leaders do not fear competing voices.”
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the European Union’s executive branch, said in a statement, “The Russian authorities must immediately release him and ensure his safety.”
“Detention of political opponents is against Russia’s international commitments,” she added.
Russian officials dismissed the criticism. Mr. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said that Western officials simply saw the case as a welcome distraction from their own problems.
“We are seeing how they’ve grabbed onto yesterday’s news about Navalny’s return to Russia — one can really feel how happily they’re commenting on it,” Mr. Lavrov said. “They are happy because it lets Western politicians think that they can thus distract attention from the global crisis in which the liberal model of development has ended up.”
As is often the case in Russia, historical symbolism loomed over the events on Monday. Photographs from inside the makeshift courtroom showed a portrait just behind Mr. Navalny of Genrikh Yagoda — a director of the Soviet secret police who supervised Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s and expanded the prison-camp system known as the Gulag.
On Russian state television’s marquee news show on Sunday night, the host Dmitry Kiselyov drew a different comparison, underscoring the government line that Mr. Navalny was working for Western intelligence agencies. He likened Mr. Navalny’s flight from Berlin to the sealed train that took Lenin from Switzerland, via Germany, to St. Petersburg in 1917, setting the stage for the Russian Revolution.
“The assault force isn’t quite on the same scale, but the Germans are in their repertoire,” Mr. Kiselyov said. “And everything is set up to show that they’re up to something special.”
