Jailed Russian politician Navalny says he’s in punishment cell

Jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny said on Monday that prison authorities had thrown him into a punishment cell for a minor rules infraction after he tried to encourage fellow inmates to form a trade union.

Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic inside Russia, is serving an 11-1/2 year sentence after being found guilty of parole violations and fraud and contempt of court charges. He says all the charges were fabricated as a pretext to jail him in order to thwart his political ambitions.

The 46-year-old, who returned to Russia in 2021 from Germany where he had been treated for what Western laboratory tests showed was an attempt to poison him in Siberia with a Soviet-era nerve agent, was moved in June to a high-security penal colony farther from Moscow. Russia denies trying to kill him.

On Monday, he said on Twitter in a post organised via his lawyers and supporters that he had been put in a punishment cell, initially for three days, for regularly failing to button the top button of his prison uniform which he said was several sizes too small for him.

via Reuters