Navalny went on a hunger strike last week against prison officials’ refusal to give him access to proper medical care. One of his lawyers said last month that he suffered from acute back pain that affected his ability to walk, and that his condition was aggravated by alleged ‘torture due to sleep deprivation’.
Navalny said the prison does not have the nutrition and nutrients needed to keep prisoners healthy. He added that the temperature was 38.1 degrees Celsius (100.6 Fahrenheit) and that he had a severe cough.
In the report Monday, Navalny also said there had been an outbreak of tuberculosis among his cellmates, with three of the group’s 15 inmates recently admitted to hospital with the disease.
“And what? Do you think there is an emergency, ambulance sirens are screaming? Nobody cares, the bosses are just worried about how to hide the statistics,” Navalny said in the post.
‘Practically exemplary’ penal colony
In the report shared on Monday, Navalny also voiced criticism of Russia’s recent state media coverage of conditions in the penal colony.
Last week, a film crew from the Russian state-run TV network RT visited the prison with Maria Butina, a Russian TV personality who is enthusiastic about gun rights and now works for the network. According to the report, the prison is ‘practically exemplary’.
Butina was convicted of conspiracy to act as an agent for a foreign state in the United States and served more than 15 months behind bars in Florida. She has pleaded guilty to trying to infiltrate conservative political circles and promote Russian interests before and after the 2016 presidential election.
Navalny pushed back against RT’s assessment of the conditions.
“This is what our ‘ideal, exemplary colony’ looks like there. Any prisoner prays to God not to come here, but inside there are unhygienic conditions, tuberculosis, lack of medication. If we look at the horrible plates in which they porridge “I’m generally surprised that there is no Ebola virus here yet, ‘Navalny said in an Instagram post on Monday.
“I have a legally guaranteed right to invite a specialist doctor at my own expense. I will not give it up; jail doctors can be trusted just as much as state TV,” he adds.
Navalny, a longtime critic of President Vladimir Putin, was jailed earlier this year for violating the probation conditions of a 2014 case in which he received a suspended sentence of three and a half years. A Moscow court has taken into account the 11 months that Navalny has already spent under house arrest as part of the ruling and replaced the rest of the suspended sentence with a prison sentence last month.