MOSCOW – Russia’s opposition leader Aleksey Navalny is on a 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 observers of the penitentiary were desperate to verify it, with hundreds of Russian public figures sending open letters and petitions to the authorities, demanding an end to the humiliating treatment. Human rights activists told the Kremlin more clearly on Friday: “He is being killed 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 US convict. Now a pro-Kremlin activist, Butina pleaded guilty in an American court in 2018 for acting as a Russian agent while infiltrating the political circles of the RNA and the Republican Party.
Butina reported what he had heard from other detainees in the prison colony, called IK-2, complaining not about the prison conditions, but about Navalny himself. Butina said other detainees despised Navalny because he “stayed in bed all day like a master” and said he “doesn’t clean up after himself.” She insisted that Navalny was living in better conditions than she had endured in an American prison. “My recommendation to Aleksey: if you have committed a crime, be a man, serve your time.”
Butina also posted a video telling Navalny that he was walking slowly into the barracks: “He’s going! Oh, that’s magic! With a cup of coffee “, she remarked. Mr. Navalny had said his legs would be numb from his back pain.
Butina said Navalny was rude to her during their 20-minute conversation, accusing her of lying and stealing. A transcript of the alleged dialogue with Navalny was published on the Telegram, and Butina said: “You know perfectly well that if you don’t clean, someone will clean for you. I went to jail. I know it’s someone else’s responsibility. “Navalny claimed to have responded by telling him that he was lying a lot and that” everything [she says] there are endless lies, including your stories about the American prison. ”
Human rights defenders were shocked. “When Navalny obviously needs professional medical care, they are sending a crew of the state RT television channel to that penal colony – this is an unacceptable situation,” Tanya Lokshina, director, told Daily Beast Russian program from Human Rights Watch. .
The rules do not prohibit an outside doctor from providing care in prison, Lokshina explained, adding that his team is “aware of cases where the Russian prison system has provided civilian doctors for sick detainees.”
Butina’s comments horrified a former IK-2 detainee, Vladimir Pereverzin, who 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 swept away and jailed after a crackdown on an oil company a decade ago, told Daily Beast. “No one is allowed to stay in bed in that prison. If she says she’s in bed all the time, it means she’s so sick that the prison doctor allowed her. ”
“Prison guards have constantly humiliated me,” he added. “They made reports against me, so like Navalny, I had to go on hunger strike. I stabbed myself in the stomach and only then did they move me to a single cell, which was a huge relief. “
An opposition playwright and satirist, Viktor Shenderovich, said Butina’s visit symbolized a general tone of ridicule in Kremlin politics.
“The government has decided to kill Navalny, to 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 the obvious supporters of good and those who support evil.”
Shenderovich described Butina’s ordeal as somewhat of a “victory” for the Kremlin loyalists.
“Many Kremlin supporters are giggling now that they are reading Butina’s comments,” he said. “They are happy to see the Kremlin trolling and mocking the news and Navalny supporters. But, in fact, this is the humiliation of morality itself. “