Is Alexei Navalny being slowly killed in captivity?

Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is being gradually poisoned behind bars, his allies claim.

The prominent critic of Vladimir Putin is being held at the maximum security IK-6 penal colony at Melekhovo, about 155 miles east of Moscow, for charges including embezzlement and contempt of court. An ambulance was called there earlier this month after Navalny suffered severe stomach pains, but the 46-year-old was reportedly not given medication.

His supporters say that he has suffered ongoing pain and considerable weight loss in recent months, but that the prison authorities have refused to admit him to hospital. No updates have been given about Navalny’s condition but close ally and activist Ruslan Shaveddinov told The Guardian that the situation was becoming “critical”, adding: “Our theory is that they are gradually killing him, using slow-acting poison which is applied through food.”

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What did the papers say?

In August 2020, Navalny was medically evacuated from Russia to Germany after being poisoned with the chemical nerve agent novichok in an alleged attack that he and the US State Department blamed on Russian security agents. The Kremlin denied any involvement.

After returning to Russia in January 2021, Navalny was detained for violating his parole for a 2014 conviction for alleged embezzlement – a move “widely regarded as a politically motivated campaign to silence” him, said The New York Times. In what Amnesty International called a “sham” trial, Navalny was slapped with a two-and-a-half year prison sentence for parole violations, before being sentenced in March last year to a further nine years for additional fraud and contempt charges.

Navalny claims to have been “repeatedly placed in solitary punishment cells for up to 15 days at a time for trivial offences, such as introducing himself incorrectly, washing his hands too early in the morning, or having the top button on his prison uniform undone”, said The Washington Post. He is now serving his “13th stint in solitary confinement in a small, stuffy punishment cell”, with just a book and a cup, and an hour’s exercise a day in a small yard.

While in confinement, the opposition leader has “suffered acute stomach pains and seizures”, the paper continued, and lost more than 17lbs (7.7kg) in just over two weeks. His lawyer has “demanded toxicological and other medical tests”, and complained to the authorities, after the doctor who treated Navalny reportedly “gave no diagnosis and told him that everyone has health issues during spring”.

Ruslan Shaveddinov, a member of Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation, told the Financial Times last week that “it’s a sort of slow and methodical murder, happening in front of our eyes right now”. Navalny’s press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, told Reuters that the team “couldn’t rule out” the possibility of incremental poisoning.

This “might sound like paranoia”, Shaveddinov told The Guardian, “but after the novichok poisoning, it seems completely plausible”.

It is “hard to adduce an innocent explanation for a mysterious ailment” afflicting Navalny, said The Times’s leading article today. The Kremlin “must be held accountable” for his safety, and “Western governments should demand it”.

What next?

“To be a dissident, or even merely a dogged journalist, in Russia requires raw courage,” said The Times. Many have died in violent, unexplained circumstances, including reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who was “gunned down” in 2006, and Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer killed in police custody in 2009.

Beyond Russian borders, former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko was murdered with polonium in London in 2006. Former Russian intelligence officer-turned-UK double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter ,Yulia, survived a novichok assassination attempt in Salisbury in 2018.

And today another opposition activist, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was sentenced to 25 years in jail for charges linked to his criticism of the Ukraine war. It is “the longest sentence an opposition figure has received so far”, said the BBC Kathryn Armstrong. Kara-Murza, who denied all the charges against him, reportedly told the closed court that “his trial reminded him of a Stalin-era show trial of the 1930s”.

Amid mounting concern about Navalny, The Times warned that even if he was not being deliberately poisoned, his life was in danger from the conditions of his imprisonment. He is “a prisoner of conscience being targeted by a rogue regime” willing to torture and murder those who oppose it.

Yet his “fate risks being overlooked” while Western countries focus on supporting Ukraine, the paper added. Relations between Russia and the West are “already at a nadir short of outright hostilities”, which is “entirely Mr Putin’s handiwork, and no good will come from tempering outrage at his treatment of a brave critic”.