For the first time since he was transferred to a penal colony in the Arctic, this Wednesday the first images of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opponent who has worried the Kremlin the most in the last decade, were seen. The activist has appeared by videoconference from prison in a court hearing.
Before the hearing, Navalni was able to speak with journalists. He said he felt good and assured that the conditions of detention in the new colony, located 60 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, are better than in the previous one, in the city of Melejovo in the Vladimir Oblast, 230 kilometers east of Moscow. .
In fact, the court session is part of a lawsuit that Navalny himself filed against the IK-6 penal colony in Vladimir for the treatment received. He wanted to challenge and have a 12-day solitary confinement imposed on him last October following an argument with a prison inspector who took a pen from him.
Alexei Navalny was in a good mood and did not stop joking. Even about the poor atmospheric conditions of a prison where he can spend most of the more than three decades to which he has already been sentenced for accusations such as fraud and extremism that he and his followers consider fabricated with the sole objective of expelling him from the scene. political or as revenge for exposing the corruption of the Russian elite.
In this new prison, which they call the “Polar Wolf” because of its harsh conditions, “there is a problem, and I don’t know which court to turn to: and it is very cold,” Navalni said.
The opponent’s sarcasm even managed to make the judge smile when during the video call he asked if the Melejovo neighborhood had celebrated his departure with a party and if it had included karaoke.
He also asked if they had held a naked party, a reference to the scandal caused last month in Russia by a party in Moscow with numerous celebrities and entertainment stars who came “almost naked.”
Navalny, 47, was transferred to his new prison in December on a long train journey that lasted almost three weeks. Something common in Russia, since the transfer of prisoners to another prison is usually carried out by rail, usually lasts weeks and the family and lawyers are only informed when it is completed. Navalni’s lawyers and team of collaborators reported his disappearance on December 6 and only learned of his new whereabouts on the 25th.
The new prison, the IK-3 Jarp penal colony, in the Russian Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, is located 1,900 kilometers away from the previous one, north of the Ural Mountains and is reputed to be one of the toughest in the country. Russian prison system.
Jarp is an urban-type settlement with a population of 5,000 people. It is located 50 kilometers from Salekhard, the administrative capital of a territory with an area like France but with a population of half a million inhabitants.
In Stalin’s time it housed a work camp that was part of the Soviet Gulag. According to the newspaper Moskovski Komsomólets, the current penal colony was created in the 1960s on top of the previous facilities.
In the messages that the opponent sends to social networks through his lawyers, he usually shows a good sense of humor, which he mixes with criticism of the Kremlin and the military campaign in Ukraine. In a message this week he joked about the bad weather, saying the temperature “hadn’t been colder than 32 degrees below zero” and that his morning exercises in the weather were “invigorating.”
During the court session this Friday he assured that the food was good, but that he had not yet received any letters or telegrams. “I’m pretty far away,” he said.
The session ended with the Kovrov Court, in Vladimir Oblast, rejecting Navalny’s claim against his previous imprisonment.