MOSCOW – Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Aleksey Navalny goes 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 of the night. Independent prison observers have been desperate to check it out and hundreds of Russian public figures are sending open letters and petitions to the authorities, demanding the arrest of the humiliating treatment. Human rights activists addressed the Kremlin on Friday in a more forceful way: “They are killing him slowly.”
The answer? Instead of sending an independent human rights observer or a doctor to visit Navalny in prison, the Kremlin sent Maria Butina, a Russian spy and former American convict. Now a pro-Kremlin activist, Butina pleaded guilty in a U.S. court in 2018 to acting as a Russian agent while infiltrating the political circles of the ANR and the Republican Party.
Butina reported what he had heard from other inmates of the prison colony, called IK-2, complaining not about the conditions of the prison, but about Navalny himself. Butina said other inmates despised Navalny for “being in bed all day like a teacher” and said he “doesn’t clean up after him.” He insisted that Navalny was living in better conditions than he had endured in the American prison. “My recommendation to Aleksey: if you have committed a crime, be a man, serve your time.”
Butina also posted a video clip that said he was showing Navalny walking slowly in his barracks: “Walk! Oh, that’s magic! With a cup of coffee “, he remarked. Mr. Navalny had said that his legs were falling asleep from back pain.
Butina said Navalny was rude to her during his nearly 20-minute conversation, accusing her of telling lies and stealing. A transcript of the alleged dialogue with Navalny was published in Telegram, where Butina said: “You know perfectly well that if you are not cleaning, someone is cleaning you. I’ve been in jail. I know it becomes someone else’s responsibility. ”Navalny allegedly responded by telling him that he is lying a lot and that“ everything [she says] they are endless lies, including your stories about the American prison. “
Human rights defenders were in shock. “At a time when Navalny obviously needs professional medical help, they are sending a crew from RT’s state television channel to this penal colony, it is an unacceptable situation,” Tanya Lokshina, director of the Russian program Human Rights Watch. .
The rules do not prohibit an outside doctor from caring for the prison, Lokshina explained, adding that his team is “aware of cases where the Russian prison system provided civilian doctors for sick inmates.”
Butina’s comments horrified a former IK-2 inmate, Vladimir Pereverzin, who had been there for seven years, describing the experience as a total nightmare.
“It’s hard to imagine anything more cynical and misleading,” Pereverzin told the Daily Beast, who was razed and jailed after a crackdown on an oil company a decade ago. “No one is allowed to stay in bed in this prison. If she says she stays in bed all the time, it means she is so sick that the prison doctor allowed it. ”
“Prison guards constantly humiliated me,” he added. “They made reports against me, so like Navalny, I had to go on hunger strike. I even stabbed myself in the stomach and only then was I transferred to a single cell, which was a great relief.
An opposition playwright and satirist, Viktor Shenderovich, said Butina’s visit symbolized a general tone of mockery of Kremlin politics.
“The government decided to kill Navalny, destroy him both physically and morally,” Shenderovich told the Daily Beast. “This is not a political movement, but a moral issue: Russia is divided right now between obvious supporters of good and those who support evil.”
Shenderovich described Butina’s trial as a “victory” for Kremlin loyalists.
“Many Kremlin supporters laugh now when they read Butina’s comments,” he said. “They are happy to see the Kremlin troll and mock Western and Navalny supporters. But in reality, this is a humiliation of morality itself.”