Alexei Navalny was lately moved to a excessive safety jail within the Russian Arctic to serve his 19-year sentence.
Russian opposition chief Alexei Navalny says he’s being held in a tiny punishment cell in an Arctic jail.
Navalny is serving a 19-year sentence within the penal colony, and stated in a press release Tuesday that he has been put within the punishment cell due to a minor infraction, the newest step designed to ramp up strain on President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest political foe.
Navalny stated in a social media assertion relayed from behind bars that jail officers accused him of refusing to “introduce himself in step with protocol” and ordered him to serve seven days in a punishment cell.
”The thought that Putin can be glad with sticking me right into a barracks within the far north and can cease torturing me within the punishment confinement was not solely cowardly, however naive as nicely,” he stated.
Navalny, 47, is jailed on prices of extremism. He had been imprisoned within the Vladimir area of central Russia, about 230 kilometres east of Moscow however was transferred final month to a “particular regime” penal colony – the very best safety stage of prisons in Russia – above the Arctic Circle.
His allies decried the switch to a colony within the city of Kharp, within the Yamalo-Nenets area about 1,900 kilometres northeast of Moscow, as yet one more try to pressure Navalny into silence.
The distant area is infamous for lengthy and extreme winters.
“It’s nearly inconceivable to get to this colony; it’s nearly inconceivable to even ship letters there. That is the very best attainable stage of isolation from the world,” Navalny’s chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, has stated on X, previously referred to as Twitter.
Navalny has been behind bars since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Earlier than his arrest, he campaigned in opposition to official corruption and arranged main anti-Kremlin protests.
He has since acquired three jail phrases, rejecting all the costs in opposition to him as politically motivated. Till final month, Navalny was serving time at Penal Colony No. 6 within the Vladimir area, and officers there commonly positioned him in a punishment cell for alleged minor infractions. He spent months in isolation.
On the jail colony in Kharp, being in a punishment cell signifies that strolling outdoors in a slender concrete jail yard is barely allowed at 6:30 am, Navalny stated Tuesday.
Inmates in common circumstances are allowed to stroll “after lunch, and though it’s the polar evening proper now, nonetheless after lunch it’s hotter by a number of levels,” he stated, including that the temperature has been as little as -32°C.
“Few issues are as refreshing as a stroll in Yamal at 6:30 within the morning,” Navalny wrote, utilizing the shorthand for the title of the area.