Around two and a half years after his imprisonment, the conditions for Russia’s best-known opposition politician Alexei Navalny have been drastically tightened again. The prison camp management informed him that he would be put in an isolation cell for a whole year, Navalny said through his team on social networks. The 47-year-old was quoted as saying that this is “the highest possible punishment” in the Russian prison system.
Just on Tuesday, a Russian appeals court confirmed Navalny’s sentence to a total of 19 years in prison for alleged extremism. Internationally, Navalny is viewed as a political prisoner, and his punishment is criticized as the Kremlin’s directive to a compliant judiciary.
The prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin was imprisoned in 2021 and is now in a prison camp around 250 kilometers from Moscow. According to his own statements, he has been locked in a solitary cell for several days each time 20 times in the past few 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 government critics.
Human rights activists also repeatedly point out Navalny’s poor health, who barely survived a nerve agent attack in the summer of 2020. Navalny accuses the Russian domestic secret service FSB and Putin of being behind the assassination attempt. The Kremlin denies this.