MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s leading opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, faces the prospect of new criminal charges after in effect being forced to break the rules of the maximum security penal colony where he is being held, one of his lawyers said on Tuesday.
Vadim Kobzev said on Twitter that a foul-smelling inmate with poor hygiene had been placed in Navalny’s cell on Monday in a “provocation” while he was doing prison labour, and that Navalny had had no choice on returning but to drag him out.
He had then been told he would be charged with thwarting prison authorities, which carries a maximum sentence of five years, Kobzev said.
The penitentiary service, which has in the past denied allegations of mistreatment, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Navalny is already serving 11-1/2 years in the IK-6 penal colony, about 240 km (150 miles) east of Moscow, on fraud and contempt of court charges that he says were trumped up to silence him.
Last Thursday, his spokeswoman said he was suffering severe stomach pain and that she feared that he had been given poison.
Two days earlier he had said on his Twitter account, run by his associates, that he had been moved back into solitary confinement and forced to endure “hellish” conditions.
Kobzev said it was Navalny’s 13th spell in a punishment cell since his arrest in 2021 after returning from Germany, where he had been recovering from being poisoned in Russia with what Western experts said was a Soviet-era nerve toxin. The Kremlin denied responsibility.
Navalny first came to prominence by drawing attention to the wealth of senior officials in a series of widely watched videos.
For a time he was able to channel public dissatisfaction with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s unchallenged leader for the last 23 years.
But his Anti-Corruption Foundation has been outlawed as “extremist”, its other leaders have gone into exile, and all significant public political dissent has been suppressed by the Kremlin.
(Writing by Kevin Liffey; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
