“And so my plans for a great New Year’s Eve were ruined.” Alexey Navalny jokes, ironically describes his life as a prisoner. But the stories that he entrusts to the web through his lawyers tell of repeated abuses against him, of a political repression that seems to continue to target him even behind bars.
Putin’s number one opponent says he was forced to spend the New Year closed in an isolation cell in the penitentiary 200 kilometers from Moscow where he is unjustly detained for political reasons. The reason? Having washed his face half an hour early on the morning of December 31st. That much – says the opponent – was enough for the officials of the IK-6 detention center in Melekhovo to send him to a penalty cell for 15 days: the maximum possible punishment.
Navalny back in punishment cell. Political repression inside prison walls: “Me sitting on a stool in 6 square meters”
Giuseppe Agliastro
“You spend New Year’s Eve in solitary confinement like any other day: wake up at 5, lights out at 21. And so, for the first time since I was six, I slept on New Year’s Eve,” Navalny says, mixing outrage and sarcasm. “In general I am satisfied: people pay to celebrate the new year in an unusual way, but I did it for free”, the dissident jokes again, saying that for the first day of 2023 he had set aside a packet of chips and some fish in box.
“Continuously locked up in a punishment cell with absurd pretexts and motivations”
Navalny says he has spent most of the last few months in solitary confinement: in fact, he says that as soon as he serves a sentence, the prison administration immediately finds a new pretext to send him back, and thus it is already the tenth time in less than five months that is sent to the penalty cell. These continued measures are considered a clear violation of human rights. According to what he or his allies told, the former leader of the anti-Putin protests was sent to solitary confinement for three days because one of the buttons on his prison uniform was undone and another 11 days because he was not wearing a jacket during a 5am inspection. For having condemned the mobilization of reservists for the criminal invasion of Ukraine ordered by Putin, he was instead inflicted 12 days in a penalty cell.
Navalny writes to his wife: “You saved me from a coma”
Amnesty International’s complaint
According to Amnesty International, the goal of the prison administration is to “break the spirit of Alexey Navalny by making his existence in the penal colony unbearable, humiliating and dehumanizing”. In September, the human rights NGO reported “deeply disturbing information about increasingly harsh treatment” of the Russian opponent. This includes harsh penalties for alleged infractions and repeated ostracism attempts by other prisoners who are reportedly not allowed to speak to him or even look at him. In serious violation of his rights and of the Russian laws themselves, Alexey Navalny is not allowed confidential meetings with his lawyer “, the organization still denounces, underlining that “the health and well-being ” of the opponent in prison “are at serious risk , and this amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
According to the lawyer Vadim Kobzev – taken from the online newspaper Medusa – Navalny is now in the punishment cell with fever and cough. The best known of Putin’s regime opponents was arrested two years ago, as soon as he set foot back in Moscow from Berlin, where he had been treated for a poisoning that had caused fear for his life and for which the Russian secret services.