About two and a half years after his arrest, the prison conditions of Russia’s best-known opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, were again drastically tightened. The prison camp management informed him that he would be placed in an isolation cell for a whole year, Navalny said today through his team on social media. The 47-year-old was quoted as saying this is “the highest possible punishment” in the Russian prison system.
The day before, a Russian appeals court upheld Navalny’s sentence to a total of 19 years in prison for alleged extremism. Internationally, Navalny is seen as a political prisoner and his punishment is criticized as a Kremlin directive for a compliant justice system.
Bad health
The prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin was arrested in 2021 and is now in a prison camp about 260 kilometers from Moscow. According to his own statements, he has been locked in a solitary cell for several days 20 times in recent months. His supporters are convinced that the Russian state apparatus wants to torture Navalny in this way, break his resistance and use him as a deterrent example for other critics of the government.
Human rights activists have also repeatedly pointed out the poor health of Navalny, who barely survived a nerve agent attack in the summer of 2020. Navalny accuses Russia’s internal secret service FSB and Putin of being behind the assassination attempt. The Kremlin denies this.