Alexei Navalny was recently moved to a high security prison in the Russian Arctic to serve his 19-year sentence.
ADVERTISEMENTRussian opposition leader Alexei Navalny says he is being held in a tiny punishment cell in an Arctic prison.
Navalny is serving a 19-year sentence in the penal colony, and said in a statement Tuesday that he has been put in the punishment cell because of a minor infraction, the latest step designed to ramp up pressure on President Vladimir Putin's fiercest political foe.
Navalny said in a social media statement relayed from behind bars that prison officials accused him of refusing to “introduce himself in line with protocol” and ordered him to serve seven days in a punishment cell.
”The thought that Putin will be satisfied with sticking me into a barracks in the far north and will stop torturing me in the punishment confinement was not only cowardly, but naive as well," he said.
Navalny, 47, is jailed on charges of extremism. He had been imprisoned in the Vladimir region of central Russia, about 230 kilometres east of Moscow but was transferred last month to a "special regime" penal colony - the highest security level of prisons in Russia - above the Arctic Circle.
His allies decried the transfer to a colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometres northeast of Moscow, as yet another attempt to force Navalny into silence.
The remote region is notorious for long and severe winters.
“It is almost impossible to get to this colony; it is almost impossible to even send letters there. This is the highest possible level of isolation from the world,” Navalny’s chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, has said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Navalny has been behind bars since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Before his arrest, he campaigned against official corruption and organized major anti-Kremlin protests.
He has since received three prison terms, rejecting all the charges against him as politically motivated. Until last month, Navalny was serving time at Penal Colony No. 6 in the Vladimir region, and officials there regularly placed him in a punishment cell for alleged minor infractions. He spent months in isolation.
At the prison colony in Kharp, being in a punishment cell means that walking outside in a narrow concrete prison yard is only allowed at 6:30 am, Navalny said Tuesday.
Inmates in regular conditions are allowed to walk “after lunch, and even though it is the polar night right now, still after lunch it is warmer by several degrees," he said, adding that the temperature has been as low as -32°C.
“Few things are as refreshing as a walk in Yamal at 6:30 in the morning,” Navalny wrote, using the shorthand for the name of the region.