12 days of isolation, no more mail… still brutal detention of Navalny’s opponent in Russia

Twelve new days (a little more) away from the outside world. Russian opponent Alexei Navalny said on Tuesday he was again placed in solitary confinement in the prison where he is already held, a day after his writing materials, his only means of communication with the outside world, were taken away. “Here I am again in solitary confinement. For 12 days,” Navalny wrote in X, earlier on Twitter.

Arrested in January 2021 upon returning from Germany, where he was hospitalized after being poisoned, 47-year-old Alexei Navalny has since been given harsh sentences, most recently to 19 years in prison for “extremism” in August. ” For more than two and a half years, he alternated between solitary confinement and more or less strict conditions of detention, decisions of the prison administration that he condemns every time.

This is the “21st time” the Kremlin’s number one opponent has been sent to solitary confinement since his detention began, according to his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh. “He will spend a total of 236 days in this type of cell,” she said, “not knowing” the reason for his absence.

Arrests of his lawyers

“(He) was deprived of writing materials. For this reason, he refused to leave his cell for (the court hearing),” said one of his relatives, Ivan Zhdanov. “Law enforcement officers entered his cell and forcibly dragged him into the investigator’s office,” he said on X.

Alexei Navalny communicates primarily through messages sent to his lawyers and then broadcast via social media, particularly condemning the Russian offensive in Ukraine. In mid-October, three lawyers who had defended him in the past were arrested on charges of “extremism,” which carries severe penalties. Opponent supporters condemned the arrests as a means of further isolating Alexei Navalny, viewing them as a new level of repression against opposition to Vladimir Putin.

Prisoner at the IK-6 penal colony in Melekhovo, 250 km east of Moscow, Alexei Navalny said in late September that he would be transferred for a year to a cell with very strict conditions, where his interaction with the outside world would be limited. be even more limited.