Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent Russian opposition activist, has been sentenced to 15 days in jail for disobeying a police order.
The Khamovniki district court in Moscow pronounced the sentence on April 12, a day after Kara-Murza was arrested by police outside his home.
According to Kara-Murza's lawyer, Vadim Prokhorov, the police said at the hearing that the politician "behaved inadequately after seeing police officers, changed the trajectory of his movement, started moving faster, ignored the officers' demand to stop, and tried to escape."
Prokhorov rejected the police account, saying that Kara-Murza was met by police officers at the entrance to his apartment block and they detained him right after he stepped out of his car.
A close associate of slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, Kara-Murza is best known for falling deathly ill on two separate occasions in Moscow -- in 2015 and 2017-- with symptoms consistent with poisoning.
Tissue samples smuggled out of Russia by his relatives were turned over to the FBI, which investigated his case as one of "intentional poisoning."
U.S. government laboratories also conducted extensive tests on the samples, but documents released by the Justice Department suggest they were unable to reach a conclusive finding.
The arrest comes amid a mounting crackdown by Russian authorities on opposition figures and any dissent to the ongoing war in Ukraine, which started on February 24.
Kara-Murza has built substantial support among U.S. lawmakers over the years, who have championed his case.
"The United States is troubled by Russian authorities' detention today in Moscow of prominent civil society leader Vladimir Kara-Murza," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in in a post on Twitter. "We are monitoring this situation closely and urge his immediate release."
The investigative group Bellingcat found that Kara-Murza had been followed by Russian security agents who were also allegedly involved in the poisoning of another opposition figure, Aleksei Navalny.
