One hundred and fifty miles east of Moscow in the high-security IK-6 penal colony, a brutal battle of wills is playing out — between a merciless tyrant and the bravest of men who refuses to be cowed by him, Will Stewart For The DailyMail writes.
For it is here that Vladimir Putin has set out to break his foe, the Russian political prisoner he most fears.
He is 46-year-old Alexei Navalny — lawyer, opposition leader and the man who has done more than any to document the dictator’s shocking corruption. IK-6 is notorious, even by Russian standards.
Violence and rape among the prisoners are commonplace. The jailers are well-known for their cruelty.
And Navalny is entirely at their mercy. He is continually being sentenced to ten-day periods of solitary confinement for imagined infractions.
On one occasion he was punished for washing his hands six minutes ahead of schedule. On another for undoing the top button of his shirt.
And as soon as he is released from one period of solitary, he is punished with another.
It must be all but impossible for him to keep track of time. His sentence of 11 and a half years — on trumped-up charges of fraud and violating parole — stretches out endlessly ahead of him.
The days are without feature. He is allowed one book, one mug and one metal stool fixed to the floor of his ‘punishment cell’.
For 30 minutes each day he is allowed a pen and piece of paper but no more. The bed is folded during the day so that he cannot lie down.
He has said the authorities have put a mentally disturbed patient — who shouts and screams incessantly — in the adjoining cell in an attempt to deprive him of sleep.
The aim is clear: to force him to submit to Putin’s twisted will.
Seventeen days ago, Navalny emerged from his 11th separate period of incarceration in a hellish 10ft by 7ft ‘concrete kennel’ with only a hole in the ground for a toilet.
He had lost more than a stone in weight and was suffering from a severe lung infection he had caught in prison — though it would be more correct to say that he was deliberately infected with it.
His vindictive jailers had previously put a tramp with a contagious respiratory condition in the same cell as him and, naturally, when Navalny became sick they neglected to treat him.
Those close to the charismatic dissident had hoped he would have an opportunity to spend a few weeks in the standard dormitory accommodation within the penal colony, offering respite of a sort.
But instead, Navalny chose this very moment to display his characteristic fearlessness, at great personal cost.
Through his lawyers, he sanctioned the release of information about his corrupt jailers themselves, the people who have made his life an inhuman misery since he arrived at IK-6 last summer.
The dossier was put together by Navalny’s now-exiled Anti-Corruption Foundation team who, over the years, have investigated and exposed, with breathtaking clarity, the debasement of Putin’s rule.
They shone a light on a dozen ‘sadist’ prison officers in a facility long known for the savage abuse of its inmates — in an attempt to make clear to them that, when the day of reckoning comes after Putin’s fall, they will be held responsible for their part in supporting his criminal regime.
The dossier homed in on the man tasked with breaking Navalny, the jail’s governor, Colonel Dmitry Nozhkin.
It named Nozhkin’s glamorous mistress, and revealed his penchant, along with that of his wife, for threesomes, as indicated by their membership of a specialist website.
It noted the anomaly that allowed another cruel senior warder, Lt Col Yury Fomin, to own a BMW X5 costing four times his declared salary.
Meanhwhile, Lt Mikhail Neimovich, 25, was identified as the person entrusted with scrupulously writing reports on Navalny and his torture in jail.
The lieutenant’s painstaking notes, detailing how Navalny has been punished for failing to address warders the proper way, and much more, are said to land regularly on Putin’s desk.
Unsurprisingly, following the release of this information by Navalny’s team, there was a lightning response.
Navalny was told he would be placed in a new harsh solitary confinement cell, with all visits by his economist wife Yulia, 46, and his family, banned. His legal team saw this as the latest episode in a blatant and sinister strategy to ‘destroy’ Navalny’s health, ‘killing him slowly’.
As he put it himself: ‘The main torment of imprisonment is, of course, the inability to see the faces of your family, to talk to your loved ones.
‘I haven’t had any visits for eight months and [now] I was told that I would be transferred to a “cell-type facility” for the maximum possible term of six months.
‘No visits are allowed there. This means more than a year without a visit. Even maniacs and serial killers serving life sentences have the right to receive a visit, but I do not.’
Not only are such criminals allowed visits, but Russia’s maniacs and serial killers have even been eligible for release — if they are willing to fight in Ukraine, and if they survive six months, Putin wipes their convictions clean.
There are murderers freely walking Russian streets because they were willing to kill in Ukraine also. There will be many more soon. Yet hell will freeze over before Putin liberates Navalny, a man he is so scared of that he cannot even publicly utter his name.
There is a saying in Russia: the truth is good, but happiness is better. As long as they are able to enjoy happiness and prosperity, the Russian people have been willing to ignore or even believe Putin’s lies. Many are in favour of the war.
Navalny, however, has chosen the truth — and the misery that results from telling it.
Last week he published a 15-point statement calling for an end to the war, prosecutions against war criminals, reparations for the Ukrainians, and democracy in Russia.
Time and again he has spoken out, heedless of the consequences.
A revelation that caused particular anger in the Kremlin was the 2021 documentary Putin’s Palace: The History Of The World’s Largest Bribe, which Navalny scripted and presented.
