“The latest sentence against me is not yet enforceable but I have heard rumors that I will be transferred to the maximum security prison in Melekhovo, where the inmates have their nails pulled out.” It is the latest tweet from the official profile of the Russian opponent Aleksei Navalny, currently in prison, “black beast” of President Vladimir Putin. The tweet, as Navalny often uses to do, ends with a note of sarcasm: “Well, at least he will have an excuse to use this trendy emoji”, he writes adding the hand emoji with nail polish. But the news revealed now on social media is far from ironic: in March, Navalny was convicted in yet another trial against him for “fraud and insulting a judge” and sentenced to nine years in a maximum security prison , away from Moscow.
In a separate tweet, the spokeswoman for Russia’s most famous opponent, Kira Yarmish, explained that “the penal colony where Putin has ordered to relocate Navalny is number 6 in the city of Melekhovo, in the Vladimir region”. The spokesperson collected several testimonies about the treatments in this prison in a thread and concluded: “It is a monstrous place even by the insane standards of Russian prisons.” “There is no law there”, she denounced, “this is where Putin wants to beat Navalny for not being afraid of him and for having told the truth”.