Alexey Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader and Putin’s critic, received his first reprimand in the Melekhovo penitentiary, the corrective colony he was moved to a week ago, shared the politician himself in a series of tweets.
According to the politician, the report was filed back in the Pokrov penitentiary in the Vladimir region, where he was previously held.
“It turns out that my first prison made up a report stating that literally in the last two hours while I was there, I "violated the dress code." At 6:30 in the morning I went to the washroom wearing a T-shirt instead of a prison jumpsuit. Just so you understand: at 6:30 in the morning all the convicts wash and shave, and everyone goes to the washroom wearing a T-shirt. But I went there dangerously! I went there as an extremist, and my T-shirt was threatening the current government,” wrote Navalny.
At his new penitentiary, Navalny was summoned and given a repriman. According to the existing rules, all the disciplinary warnings that inmates get “disappear” only when a year passes since receiving the last one. If not for the T-shirt getting written up, Navalny’s previous warnings would stop counting in August of this year.
Navalny pointed out that after two reprimands he could be sent to solitary confinement where “where you could easily die of "pneumonia" or break your neck falling from the bed, and someone will get rewarded for this in the form of a visit from his mom.”
On 22 March, a Moscow court sentenced Navalny to nine years in a high-security prison and issued him a fine of 1.2 million rubles (€20,000) for fraud and contempt of court. The Moscow City Court rejected an appeal.
At the end of May, the politician said that he had been newly charged for “creating an extremist organisation”. Navalny is facing up to 15 more years added to his sentence.
