Putin, who turns 69 this year, is currently serving his fourth presidential term, which is due to end in 2024. The new legislation, announced on Monday, could allow him to serve two more six-year terms. where he would choose to run and win re-election both times.
The new law formalizes the results of last year’s referendum on amendments to Russia’s constitution.
In addition to resetting the clock to Putin’s term, the referendum was also a vote on a number of other amendments, including a provision that defined marriage strictly as a “union of a man and a woman.”
Navalny was transported to Germany for emergency treatment following his poisoning in Siberia last year, which he says was ordered by Putin and carried out by agents of the Russian security service, FSB. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied the allegations.
Navalny hunger strike
On Monday, Navalny said he would continue the strike, despite having a high temperature and a bad cough amid a tuberculosis outbreak among his fellow inmates, according to an Instagram post shared by his team on his official account.
“The third person on my team was recently hospitalized with tuberculosis,” Navalny said. “There are 15 people in the detachment, ie 20% of them are sick, this is much higher than the epidemiological threshold. And what? Do you think there is a state of emergency, the sirens of the ambulance sound? Nobody cares, the bosses are just worried how to hide statistics. “
He recently criticized the Russian state media for covering the conditions inside the penal colony, after Maria Butina, an employee of state broadcaster RT, visited the prison and said it was “practically exemplary.”
Butina spent time in a US prison after pleading guilty to trying to infiltrate conservative political circles and promote Russian interests before and after the 2016 presidential election.
On Instagram, Navalny said that “there are unhealthy conditions, tuberculosis, lack of drugs. Looking at the terrible plates in which they put the gruel on us, I am generally surprised that there is no Ebola virus here yet.”
He added that the prison did not have the food and nutrients needed to keep prisoners healthy.
“Of course I’m on hunger strike,” Navalny wrote in the post. “I have a guaranteed legal right to invite a specialist at my own expense. I will not give up on this. Prison doctors can be trusted as much as state television.”
A major opposition-linked Russian doctors’ union, the Alliance of Doctors, led by a Navalny ally, said in a YouTube video Monday that a group of doctors would go to Navalny Prison on Tuesday for help. appropriate for the opposition figure.