Navalny accuses Russian prison authorities of using his health as a tool to put pressure on him
Aleksei A. Navalny, jailed Russian opposition leader who survived an alleged assassination attempt staged by the Kremlinsaid that he is having back pain that is getting worse after months of solitary confinement in a penal colony.
Mr. Navalny said in a series of Twitter posts on Monday that he had been injected with an unknown drug that did not relieve his pain and that he accused the authorities of deliberately hiding his medical records.
“If you put a person in a punishment cell, where he can stand or sit on an iron chair for 16 hours a day, then after a month in such conditions, even a healthy person will inevitably get sick. back,” Mr. Navalny wrote on Twitter. “I have spent the past three months like this. Naturally, my back hurts a lot.
Mr. Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021 after recovering in a Berlin hospital from an assassination and was quickly arrested. A few weeks later, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for violating the terms of his previous pardon while in Germany. He was given a new nine-year sentence in March, after Russia invaded Ukraine, after prosecutors accused him of embezzling donations from his supporters.
Mr. Navalny has become Russia’s most prominent opposition leader by exposing high-profile corruption and challenging President Vladimir V. Putin and his party, United Russia. White House officials have said that US intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia’s security The police agent poisoned Mr. Navalny.
In his Twitter posts, Mr Navalny said that prison authorities were not authorized to use gross force against him, but they used other means to get him to comply, including forcing him to had to share a cell with a dirty inmate.
This month, he was sentenced to 12 days in a punitive cell for using swear words when speaking to a roommate, the ninth such sentence in the past six months, he said.
After repeatedly asking for medical assistance, a doctor appeared, he said in a post. He said that no diagnosis had been revealed to him, and that he was not sure what medication he had been given.
Mr. Navalny said that weeks after asking for his medical records to try to see the diagnosis and what he had been prescribed, he finally received them. He attached what appeared to be logs to his posts, showing that they had been copied in a way that made them almost unreadable.
Mr. Navalny remained active while in prison at Russia’s No. 2 Notorious Criminal Colonyregularly publishes updates on his time there and comments on the political and economic situation in Russia.
His political organization, which a few years ago had offices and activists in all major Russian cities, was wiped out by the authorities. All of its top leaders have fled, and many activists have been arrested.
