MOSCOW – Russian captured opposition leader Aleksey Navalny is on hunger strike in a notorious penal colony. He says he suffers from back pain while prison guards “torture” him by waking him up every hour at night. Independent observers at the jail were desperate to investigate him, while hundreds of Russian public figures sent public letters and petitions to authorities to stop the humiliating treatment. Human rights activists addressed the Kremlin more directly on Friday: “He is being killed slowly.”
The reaction? Instead of sending an independent human rights observer or a doctor to visit Navalny in prison, the Kremlin sends Maria Butina, a Russian spy and a former US prisoner. Now a pro-Kremlin activist, Butina pleaded guilty in a U.S. court in 2018 to acting as a Russian agent while infiltrating the NRA and political circles.
Butina reported what she heard from other inmates in the prison colony, called IK-2, and complained not about the conditions in the prison, but about Navalny himself. Butina said other prisoners despised Navalny for “lying in bed all day like a master” and said he was “not cleaning up after himself”. She insisted that Navalny lived in better conditions than she had endured in a U.S. prison. “My recommendation to Aleksey: if you have committed a crime, be a man, serve your time.”
Butina also posted a video clip in which Navalny slowly points to his barracks: “He’s walking! Oh, that’s magic! With a cup of coffee,” she remarks.
Butina said Navalny was rude to her during their approximately 20-minute conversation and accused her of telling and stealing lies. A transcript of the alleged dialogue with Navalny was published on Telegram, with Butina saying: ‘You know very well that if you do not clean, someone will clean for you. I was in jail. I know it’s someone else’s responsibility. Navalny allegedly responded by telling her she was lying a lot, and that, “everything [she says] are endless lies, including your stories about the American prison. ”
Defenders of human rights were shocked. “At a time when Navalny is obviously in need of professional medical help, they are sending an RT state TV channel crew to that very penal colony – this is an unacceptable situation,” said Tanya Lokshina, director of the Russian program at Human Rights Watch. , told The Daily Beast. .
Rules do not prohibit an external doctor from providing care in prison, Lokshina explained, adding that her team is “aware of cases in which the Russian prison system has provided civilian doctors for sick prisoners.”
Butina’s remarks shocked a former IQ-2 prisoner, Vladimir Pereverzin, who had served there for seven years, describing the experience as a total nightmare.
“It’s hard to imagine anything more cynical and misleading,” Pereverzin, who was whipped up and jailed after an oil company crackdown a decade ago, told the Daily Beast. “No one is allowed to stay in bed in prison. If she says he stays in bed all the time, it means he’s so sick that the prison has allowed it. ‘
“The prison guards kept humiliating me,” he added. “They invented reports against me, so I, like Navalny, had to go on a hunger strike. I even stabbed myself in the stomach and just after that they moved me to a single cell, which was a great relief. ‘
An opposition playwright and satirist, Viktor Shenderovich, said Butina’s visit symbolized a general mockery of Kremlin policy.
“The government has decided to kill Navalny, to destroy him physically and morally,” Shenderovich told Daily Beast. “This is not a political step, but a moral issue: Russia is currently divided between obvious supporters of good and those who support evil.”
Shenderovich described the Butina trial as a “victory” for the Kremlin loyalists.
“Many Kremlin supporters are giggling now as they read Butina’s comments,” he said. “They are happy to see the Kremlin troll and ridicule Western and Navalny supporters. But actually it is the humiliation of morality itself. ”