RIGA, Latvia — Lawyers and associates of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny fear that Russian authorities may be slowly poisoning him in prison after he suffered acute stomach pains and seizures and lost more than 17 pounds in a recent spell in an isolated “punishment” cell.
Navalny was jailed in 2021 and is serving 11½ years on charges widely viewed as trumped up because of his opposition to President Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Since Navalny’s imprisonment, Russia has taken a sharp authoritarian turn, arresting and jailing thousands of activists and antiwar figures, and raising fears for his survival in the hands of an isolated government disdainful of Western criticism.
Navalny survived poisoning in 2020 with the chemical nerve agent Novichok, an attack that the State Department blamed on the Russian state. He has been repeatedly placed in solitary punishment cells for up to 15 days at a time for trivial offenses, such as introducing himself incorrectly, washing his hands too early in the morning, or having the top button on his prison uniform undone.
Navalny is now serving his 13th stint in solitary confinement in a small, stuffy punishment cell, and has spent a total of four months in such conditions. He is allowed a book and a cup. The bunk bed is folded up during the day. The cell dimensions are 10 feet by 6.5 feet, and the yard for an hour’s exercise a day is a similar size.
“Regarding the blatant and very strange situation around Navalny’s health, with seizures that have never had any signs, we cannot rule out the possibility that he is simply being ‘slowly poisoned’ so that his health does not deteriorate dramatically, but gradually and steadily,” Kobzev posted on Twitter recently. “This may sound delusional and paranoid to someone else, but not to Navalny after Novichok.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that the Kremlin did not keep track of Navalny’s health in prison “and does not have the appropriate capacity or authority” to do so.
Navalny emerged from the punishment cell last week only to be sent back on Monday, and believes that he was actually being punished for a YouTube investigation by his Anti-Corruption Foundation last month that exposed his mistreatment by prison authorities, and alleged corruption in food acquisitions by the Federal Penitentiary Service.
Navalny’s public comments are posted online by his team.
“They torture and steal. They steal to torture,” his press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, said in the YouTube report. “Putin has created a system that encourages the worst of people — thieves and sadists.”
The investigation exposed details about the prison system’s procurement of food items, alleging that it was paying nearly five times the market price for cabbage, with similar unexplained markups for onions, fish and fries.
“Alexei’s guards simply pocket the balance,” Yarmysh said.
Navalny outlined new stricter measures meted out by prison authorities since the procurement investigation.
His hour of daily exercise was moved to 7 a.m., before sunlight reaches the small external yard. A sewing machine was moved into the next cell, so that he can carry out his prison labor without encountering other prisoners. And his allotted time for writing and reading mail has been reduced. He is also no longer allowed to supplement the prison diet by buying food from the prison shop. “And a bunch of unpleasant little things that would simply not be understood by a free person,” he added.
Despite the risk of punishment, he continues to speak out. Navalny said the entire prison management was implicated in the “golden cabbage” scheme.
“They are protecting the cabbage! ‘Don’t touch, we’re eating here!’” he posted. “That’s why I always talk about the importance of fighting corruption. The entire Putin system, absurdly disguised as conservatism and spirituality, exists only to steal money via cabbage. And it doesn’t matter what the cabbage is: oil refineries, budget money, Siberian timber, tanks, or cabbage itself. The system will steal at all levels because that is its essence.”
The investigation named the judges and prison officials responsible for placing Navalny in solitary confinement and denying him his legal right to winter boots or medical care.
Navalny has mounted a series of legal appeals against his poor treatment, but video camera evidence to prove his case has been unavailable, with officials claiming software failures, power surges and irrecoverable data, according to the report.
A legal official from the Federal Penitentiary Service, Artyom Krylov, told one hearing that video from Nov. 22 was not available “because a software failure occurred” and “there was a complete loss of data and the information cannot be restored.”
In January, Navalny posted that he had read “My Testimony,” the autobiography of Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko, who was repeatedly jailed and died in a Soviet prison at age 48 in 1986 after a three-month hunger strike, calling for the release of political prisoners. Marchenko’s experience of conditions, Navalny said, was strikingly similar to his own.
Marchenko described suffering “hunger, illness, and above all helplessness, the sheer impossibility of struggling against evil.” The maximum time in punishment cell was and still is 15 days, but according to Marchenko, “this rule is easy for the boss to get around” with back-to-back punishments.
“The pattern is the same. It’s the same with everything,” Navalny wrote. “Hunger, food, cigarettes, visits, parcels and kiosks — that’s what the world of a convict turns around.”
Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report.