Status: 01/13/2023 5:00 p.m
The Kremlin critic Navalny is suffering from solitary confinement and illness. His followers see this as an attempt to wear him down. 600 Russian doctors have appealed to President Putin to provide him with medical assistance.
Moscow surgeon Alexander Vanyukov doubts whether the appeal by more than 600 Russian doctors to Russian President Vladimir Putin to provide medical help to the sick imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny helped. The doctor, who is currently in Riga, Latvia, is one of the initiators. Getting the open letter off the ground was the least that could have been done, even if it was actually hopeless.
On the YouTube channel “Popular Politics”, run by Navalny supporters, he said: “Even if there are a million people, there will be no official reaction. Because unfortunately it seems to me that these people are quite it doesn’t matter what people think of them and what the citizens of this country generally think.”
At least Navalny’s condition, who is said to have suffered from fever, chills and a cough, has not deteriorated any further, according to his lawyer Vadim Kobsev. He has now received medicine and can drink hot water twice a day.
“Literally a Cage”
Since the summer of last year, Navalny has been serving nine years in a camp in the Melekhovo penal colony, about 260 kilometers north-east of Moscow. For his spokeswoman Kira Jarmysch, the fact that solitary confinement was imposed again at the beginning of the year is clearly an attempt to wear him down. That is ultimately torture, according to Jarmysch on the YouTube channel of the independent broadcaster Doschd, which has been blocked in Russia.
For example, they brought a person with the flu to his cell to catch it, and now they refuse to treat him. In addition, the constant admissions to a punishment cell. This is his tenth time there now. They want to make it as difficult as possible for him because his cell there is two by three square meters. It’s a tiny cage for a man his size. It’s literally a cage you can’t move in. You cannot walk, only stand or sit. You can’t even lie down.
Minor reasons are often sufficient to end up in solitary confinement, for example violations of the prescribed daily routine such as getting up too early. Despite everything, Navalny has sarcastic comments about his own situation spread through his lawyer Kobsev. After New Year’s Eve, for example, he announced that he had overslept the New Year for the first time since childhood because the regulations in the isolation cell stipulate bed rest from 9 p.m. Other people would pay a lot of money for an unusual New Year’s Eve celebration – he would get it for free.
Navalny is in the prison camp under particularly harsh prison conditions for alleged fraud. In 2020, he was poisoned in Tomsk, Siberia, from which he barely survived. When he returned to Russia from treatment at the Berlin Charité, he was arrested immediately and sentenced to a total of nine years in prison in controversial proceedings. The prison sentence against him was criticized internationally as politically motivated.
Still concerned about Navalny’s health
Stephan Laack, ARD Moscow, January 13, 2023 3:49 p.m