Russian journalists facing criminal charges for their ties to late opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) have spoken of the inhumane conditions they are being subjected to in the Moscow prison where they are being held ahead of their trial.
Reuters producer Konstantin Gabov and former Associated Press journalist Sergey Karelin were both arrested in April and charged with “involvement with an extremist organisation”, a criminal offence that is punishable with up to six years in prison, over their alleged association with the FBK.
In a letter shared with independent news outlet Mediazona, Gabov described how he had been “taken to a special unit for especially dangerous” detainees at Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina prison and placed in a cell crowded with inmates who had been convicted of terror and treason offences.
“The cell is overcrowded. One other guy and I sleep on the floor. He’s been living like this for a month. During the day, we sit on a bench with no backrest, as there’s nowhere else,” Gabov wrote, adding that the bedding he was given had turned out to be infested with bedbugs.
In a separate letter from the same facility published by Novaya Gazeta on Tuesday, Karelin also complained of awful conditions. “I’ve been sleeping top to tail, but not in a bunk, which is flat and hard, but on a prison fold-out bed with a dip in the middle. … There is zero personal space in the cell where I am now,” he wrote.
Gabov, Karelin and two other journalists, Antonina Favorskaya and Artyom Kriger, are all currently awaiting trial on charges of working for the FBK and have been accused by investigators of producing videos for YouTube channels run by other associates of late Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny.
The FBK, which was declared a foreign agent by Russia’s Justice Ministry in October 2019, was forced to disband after it was deemed an extremist organisation in 2021.