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Jailed Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny has been placed in punitive solitary confinement, a day after his allies said he was stripped of writing materials — his only means of communicating with the outside world.
A post on Navalny’s account on X, formerly Twitter, said the Kremlin critic will spend 12 days in solitary after a prison warrant officer wrote him up for an unclear violation.
“I’m back in the punishment cell. 12 days. The basis is the report of the prison warrant officer, in which he very mysteriously, with ellipses, wrote: “When taking the convict Navalny out of his cell to get a mattress, he humiliated my dignity, saying that I…t, o…l, and h…t,” Navalny’s post said.
Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said in posts on social media that this was the 21st time he has been put in solitary confinement since he was sent to the IK-6 prison, 250 kilometers east of Moscow, in August 2022.
Yarmysh added that once the current 12-day punishment was served, he “will have spent 236 days” in such a cell in total.
Navalny, one of President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics, had his sentence increased to 19 years earlier this year and will soon be moved to a “special regime” prison, the harshest type in Russia.
Three of his lawyers were arrested this month, with his team warning that Russian authorities want to further restrict his contacts outside prison. Another of his lawyers fled Russia earlier this month.
Navalny’s allies said on October 23 that he missed a court hearing, which was taking place inside the maximum-security prison where he is held, to protest a decision of the prison administration to deprive him of writing materials.
“Aleksei Navalny was deprived of his writing tools. Now has no ability to write letters. Therefore, he declined to come out from his cell for the trial,” Yarmysh said on social media on October 23.
Writing letters and visits from lawyers are Navalny’s only way to communicate with the world.
“Nobody is allowed to see me. I am completely isolated from information,” Navalny said during a court hearing in prison last week, calling the arrests of his lawyers “illegal.”
Navalny has been in and out of solitary confinement in recent months, and his allies say his health has deteriorated.
In August, judges of the Moscow City Court found Navalny guilty of creating an extremist organization and more than doubled his prison term to 19 years, ruling that one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s sharpest critics must be transferred to a harsher “special regime” facility, rather than the maximum-security prison where he currently is held.
Navalny’s imminent move to the harsher prison will even further limit his contact with lawyers.
The charges against Navalny are widely seen as retribution for his efforts to expose what he describes as the pervasive lawlessness, corruption, and repression by Putin and his political system.
Navalny was Russia’s loudest opposition voice and galvanized huge anti-government rallies before he was jailed.
His previous sentence was handed down in 2021 after he arrived in Moscow from Germany, where he had been recovering from a poisoning attack he blamed on the Kremlin.
Before the most recent conviction, he was serving a combined 11 1/2 years for embezzlement and violating the terms of his parole while he was in Germany being treated for the poisoning.
With reporting by AFP
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