In Moscow
The few information that leaks from the dreaded "prison camp number 2", 100 km east of Moscow, where Alexeï Navalny has been imprisoned since the beginning of March, confirm the fears of his relatives.
According to these sources, the number one opponent of the Kremlin, sentenced in February to two and a half years in prison for a fraud case dating back to 2014, would be subjected to extremely harsh conditions of detention which would lead to a worrying deterioration of his condition. health.
In a complaint to the authorities and made public Thursday on his website, Alexeï Navalny explained that he was woken up
"eight times a night"
by his jailers.
The guards
"deprive me of sleep, it is de facto a recourse to torture by deprivation of sleep",
he writes.
This information corroborates the methods prevailing in this prison - whose code name is IK-2 and which is one of the 684 labor camps currently accommodating 393,000 prisoners in Russia.
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"Apparently I have a nerve stuck because I was sitting and curled up all the time"
in police vans and in cells, Russia's most famous detainee said on Instagram on Friday
.
"I have a lot of back pain, without being able to bend or straighten up"
, adds the opponent, 44 years old, indicating that
"certain areas"
of his right leg have lost their sensitivity, and who says he is afraid of losing it .
His lawyer Olga Mikhailova, who could hardly meet him on Thursday, said he feared for
"the life and health"
of the opponent who was taken to a hospital on Wednesday evening.
He underwent an MRI examination, but without a diagnosis being transmitted to him.
The prison authorities in the Vladimir region, where the prison is located, confined themselves to asserting that the prisoner's state of health was considered
"stable and satisfactory".
.
Until the end, Alexeï will be patient, he will try to fend for himself and make jokes
Youlia Navalnaïa, Alexeï Navalny's wife
Faced with the worsening of his pains, Alexeï Navalny had asked to
"receive care"
, in a letter addressed to the federal penitentiary administration (FSIN) and to the general prosecutor's office.
However, according to his lawyer Olga Mikhailova, if he was indeed examined by a neurologist, he was only prescribed ibuprofen, a common anti-inflammatory.
“Until the end, Alexeï will be patient, he will try to fend for himself and make jokes,”
Youlia Navalnaïa wrote on her Instagram account on Thursday.
The opponent's wife, who once again joined Germany this week, where the couple's son was celebrating his thirteenth birthday, explains that her husband's state of health has continued to worsen for a month
.
"A doctor who takes care of back problems wrote me on a paper special gymnastic exercises that would relieve the pain (...) but these bastards did not want to give it to Alexeï"
, she writes.
His wife and relatives cite the weakening of the opponent's state of health which would result from the attempted poisoning of which he was the target, last August, and the long recovery that followed.
“Having already experienced the interaction with the doctors at the Omsk hospital
(in Siberia, where he was first hospitalized before being transferred to Berlin, Editor's note)
it is clear that we cannot not trust the doctors of the prison administration to whom he will be entrusted, ”
adds Youlia Navalnaïa, on Instagram.
She once again denounces a
"personal revenge"
by Vladimir Poutine against her husband, accusing the Russian president of having imprisoned him for
"fear of political competition"
and calling for his immediate release.
Western sanctions
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to react on Friday and returned the ball to the federal prison administration
, "in charge of the conditions of detention"
.
Asked about the practice of waking a detainee every hour and thus depriving him of sleep, Mr. Peskov only said that
"such disciplinary measures are stricter in foreign prisons than in Russia ...
" Questioned by journalists, the spokesperson was careful to refute any resemblance between the case of Alexey Navalny and that of Sergei Magnitsky, lawyer and opponent, who died in a remand center in Moscow in 2009, after complaining about ill-treatment and worsening of his state of health.
The case had an international impact and generated jurisprudence in the United States to motivate the launch of sanctions against Russia.
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After Navalny's imprisonment, senior Russian officials were sanctioned by the European Union, the United States and Canada. The deterioration of his state of health would undoubtedly not fail to revive the mobilization in his favor, on the international level, but also in Russia, where gatherings were severely repressed at the beginning of the year. Its supporters, however, have just launched a petition calling for demonstrations again, once the number of 500,000 signatories has been reached.
