After 50 days in jail, Navalny is summoned for questioning in yet another criminal case

Update. Navalny's “interrogation” lasted just three minutes. He says he was asked to sign a standard form and then told that the authorities would be in touch. Navalny credits the news media's attention with alerting the Kremlin that the Interior Ministry had supposedly misinterpreted its “instructions.”

Almost immediately after going free from 50 days in jail, anti-corruption activist and opposition politician Alexey Navalny says he was summoned by police on October 15 to be interrogated for two-year-old defamation charges brought by Interior Ministry investigator Pavel Karpov, who accuses Navalny of sharing hyperlinks to the documentary film “Russian Untouchables,” which ties Karpov to the torture and murder of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergey Magnitsky.

“As far as I understand it,” Navalny wrote on his website, “they can't arrest me on these exact charges today — it's only about major fines right now, but who the hell knows how the wild and creative legal machine works in Putin's head.”

• In June 2015, a Moscow court awarded Karpov 8 million rubles ($122,000) from Hermitage Capital, CEO Bill Browder, and Firestone Duncan founder Jamison Firestone in damages caused by the “Untouchables” film. Karpov has won several other defamation suits in Russia related to the Magnitsky case, including one against former State Duma deputy Dmitry Gudkov for 100,000 rubles ($1,525).