The head of jailed Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s office said worsening prison conditions are threatening his health as his Anti-Corruption Foundation plans to turn upcoming local elections in Moscow into a referendum against the war.
Navalny was arrested in January last year on his return to Russia from Germany, where he was being treated after a poisoning in Siberia that Western laboratories concluded was caused by a Soviet-era toxin. Russia rejects claims that it is behind the poisoning.
The Russian dissident is serving 11 and a half years in prison for violating his probation, fraud and contempt of court, which he denies.
In posts on Twitter and Instagram, Navalny wrote last week through his lawyer that he was sent to solitary confinement three times in August because of his political activities.
That cell, three meters long and two meters wide, with a table, a chair and a folding bed from 6 in the morning to 10 in the evening, is a significant deterioration in the conditions of the Russian opposition leader, said the head of his office, Leonid Volkov.
“Suddenly, three weeks ago, they began to dramatically worsen his conditions, which poses an exceptional threat to his health because no normal person could spend so much time in that ‘special’ cell,” Volkov said in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, where he is being held most of Navalny’s organization since their work was banned in Russia.
“And for Aleksej, who recently survived poisoning, it is especially dangerous,” added Volkov, who speaks with his boss through a lawyer. He emphasized that Navalny is still “mentally and physically very strong”.
Volkov said that he does not know what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan is and that he tries not to think about it.
“The fact that Putin is losing the war and becoming increasingly unpredictable makes the situation even more dangerous.”
Volkov believes that Navalny will be released as soon as Putin steps down from power, but that nothing else is certain because the influence of the West on Moscow, which previously helped Navalny’s prison conditions, ended with the beginning of the Russian invasion.
“Two to three years”
Navalny’s team has been trying to turn public opinion against the invasion on YouTube since the invasion began in February, and Volkov claims that 15 million Russians have seen the videos on the network.
“We know that our actions help in slowly changing public opinion. It will take two to three years to dramatically change the attitude of Russian society and make this war so unpopular that it cannot continue,” he said.
Municipal elections are being held in Moscow on Sunday, and Navalny’s team hopes to turn them into a protest against the war. They support 400 candidates who oppose the invasion.
“They are facing great pressure, even violence and brutality. They are physically attacked,” said Volkov.
“Very ugly things happen, but people are still fighting and we support them,” he concluded.
Volkov does not support the idea of a part of the European Union members to completely ban the entry of Russians into that alliance because it would be a propaganda gift for the Kremlin.
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