Putin promotes Valeri Boyarinev, deputy head of prisons, after Navalny's death in prison

Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin's number one political enemy, died under strange circumstances in prison last Friday, February 16.

Three days later, the Russian president was promoted to the rank of colonel-general in command who ordered the dissident's food restricted in prison.

The first deputy head of the Federal Penitentiary Service, Valeri Boyarinev, and three other members of the organization received their promotion this Monday, as stated in the decree signed by the Russian president.

This promotion has caused indignation in the opposition circle.

“A personal reward from Putin for torture and murder,” denounced the director of his organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Ivan Zhdanov.

Boyarinev sent an order in 2023 to the IK-6 prison in the Vladimir region, where Navalny was then imprisoned - at the end of last December he was transferred to a prison in the Yamal-Nenets region, in the Arctic Circle -, in which he asked to limit to a cost of 5,000 rubles (approximately 50 euros at the exchange rate) the amount of food that the opponent could purchase per month in the prison canteen, beyond the crumbs that reached the punishment cell.

“Navalni writes that a prisoner in a penal colony is always hungry,” the opposition team said a year ago.

“This is a form of pressure;

Any food other than porridge is valuable: 'Give me a boiled egg, I will crumble it and feel like porridge.

"I'm in a Michelin-star restaurant," the Anti-Corruption Foundation, declared extremist by the Kremlin, said on behalf of the opposition.

“The IK-6 prison can think of a million formal reasons not to give Alexei a decent meal,” their organization explained.

“Either they don't bring him the forms or they don't like the time or day he delivers them.

In April they held on to the order amount.”

After reporting this situation, the dissident's team had access to Boyarinev's letter in which he limited the amount of food for the prisoner.

For his part, the founder of the platform against torture in Russian prisons Gulagu Net (No more gulag, in reference to the political prisoner camps of the Soviet regime), Vladimir Osechkin, denounced this Tuesday that Boyarinev has been responsible for supervise punishments against Ukrainian prisoners of war and Navalny himself.

This veteran human rights organization has revealed other prison torture in the past, such as the rapes of prisoners in 2021, which led to the dismissal of several senior prison officials.

Boyarinev, in “an unusual act among the heads of the penitentiary service,” according to Russian independent media, commented on Navalny's situation that same year.

The senior official stressed that the opponent did not have the right to vote in the legislative elections held in 2021. “Convicts whose sentences have already been legally carried out, according to Russian legislation, do not vote.

In our country, only people who are in preventive detention centers or whose sentence is not in the process of execution vote,” the official explained.

In addition to Boyarinev, other generals from almost all of the Kremlin's security agencies have been promoted, including members of the Interior Ministry, the National Guard and the Investigative Committee.

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