Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny announced on Wednesday via his Instagram account that he is going on hunger strike until he is allowed in the prison where he is being held to receive medical assistance, as “marked by law.”
“I have the right to call a doctor and get medicine. They give me neither one nor the other. The pain in my back has moved to my leg. Some parts of my right and now left leg have lost sensitivity,” he said.
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Navalny, 44, is being held in a prison located in the city of Pokrov (Vladimir), known for the harsh psychological isolation to which it subjects prisoners, in addition to the harsh conditions of the facility.
“Instead of medical assistance, they torture me with sleep deprivation, they wake me up at night eight times,” Navalny has denounced, claiming that prison authorities persuade activist prisoners to intimidate inmates and not to clean around their beds.
“This is Vladimir’s region. A prisoner’s life is worth less than a pack of cigarettes,” he said. Navalni will have to spend two and a half years in jail for violating the probation imposed against him in exchange for a suspended four-year prison sentence for committing fraud.
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Navalni, who often uses his social networks to protest the conditions in which he finds himself, had previously indicated that the center’s management subjects him to a kind of “torture” with the aim of “accumulating reprimands” with which “you can go to an isolation cell.”
