Navalny: I'm in Punishment Cell at Arctic Prison Colony

Russian opposition leader says he's only allowed outside at 6:30am
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Jan 10, 2024 2:30 AM CST
Navalny Says He's Been Placed in Punishment Cell
In this handout photo released by Moscow City Court Press Service, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is seen on a TV screen, as he appears in a video link provided by the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service in a courtroom at Moscow City Court in Moscow, Russia, on May 31, 2023.   (Moscow City Court Press Service via AP, File)

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Tuesday that officials at the Arctic penal colony where he is serving a 19-year sentence have isolated him in a tiny punishment cell over a minor infraction, the latest step designed to ramp up pressure on President Vladimir Putin's fiercest political foe, the AP reports. Navalny said in a social media statement relayed from behind bars that prison officials accused him of refusing to "introduce himself in line with protocol" and ordered him to serve seven days in a punishment cell. "The thought that Putin will be satisfied with sticking me into a barracks in the far north and will stop torturing me in the punishment confinement was not only cowardly, but naive as well," he said in his usual sardonic manner.

Navalny, 47, is jailed on charges of extremism. He had been imprisoned in the Vladimir region of central Russia, about 140 miles east of Moscow, but was transferred last month to a "special regime" penal colony—the highest security level of prisons in Russia—above the Arctic Circle. His allies decried the transfer to a colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow, as yet another attempt to force Navalny into silence. The remote region is notorious for long and severe winters. At the prison colony, being in a punishment cell means that walking outside in a narrow concrete prison yard is only allowed in the bitter cold at 6:30am, Navalny said Tuesday.

"It is almost impossible to get to this colony; it is almost impossible to even send letters there. This is the highest possible level of isolation from the world," Navalny's chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, has said on X, formerly known 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. Before his arrest, he campaigned against official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests. He has since received three prison terms, rejecting all the charges against him as politically motivated.

(More Alexei Navalny stories.)

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