OREANDA-NEWS. Alexei Navalny announced that he will return to Russia on January 17. In his Instagram account, he said that he had already bought tickets home for Sunday, January 17, adding that he would return to Moscow on a Pobeda airline flight.

Navalny was taken to the hospital on August 20 in Omsk after he felt sick during the flight from Tomsk. Based on the results of his check-up, Omsk doctors named the main diagnosis as metabolic disorder, which caused a sharp change in blood sugar. No poisoning substances were found in Navalny's blood and urine, according to Omsk doctors. After that he flew to Germany, where he was examined by local doctors and underwent a rehabilitation course.

The German government stated, citing military doctors, that Navalny was allegedly poisoned with a substance from the Novichok group of toxic substances. In this regard, the Kremlin stated that Berlin did not inform Moscow of its conclusions, and the Russian Foreign Ministry highlighted that Russia was waiting long for a response from Germany to an official request on this situation: in a month, Russia sent German side three requests for legal assistance on the situation with Navalny, but replies on them have not been received.

The FRG authorities did not earlier deny that the German intelligence service BND had access to the military poison Novichok since the 1990s.

In December, the official representative of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Svetlana Petrenko, announced that a criminal case was opened against Navalny under the article on fraud on an especially large scale. The investigation found out that out of 588 million rubles collected in the form of donations for the needs of a number of non-profit organizations, Navalny, as their de facto leader, spent more than 356 million rubles for personal purposes.