The press secretary of imprisoned Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny said on February 6 that the outspoken Kremlin critic had been placed in solitary confinement five days earlier for unspecified reasons.
According to Kira Yarmysh, Navalny's current solitary confinement term is 10 days. It is the 26th time he's been placed in solitary confinement since his incarceration more than three years ago. Including this term, Navalny will have spent 293 days in solitary confinement over the period of his current sentence.
It is also Navalny’s third placement in solitary confinement at the Polar Wolf prison in Russia's Arctic region, where he was transferred in December 2023.
Navalny, who nearly died after being poisoned with a Novichok-type nerve agent in 2020, which he blames on Russian security operatives acting at the behest of President Vladimir Putin, was detained on January 17, 2021, at a Moscow airport upon his arrival from Germany, where he was treated for the attack.
He was then handed a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for violating the terms of an earlier parole during his convalescence abroad. The Kremlin has denied any involvement in Navalny's poisoning.
The original conviction is widely regarded as a trumped-up, politically motivated case.
In March 2022, Navalny was handed a nine-year prison term on charges of contempt and embezzlement that he and his supporters have repeatedly rejected as politically motivated.
Later, Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation and his network of regional offices were designated "extremist" organizations and banned after his arrest, which led to another probe against him on extremism charges.
In August last year, a court extended Navalny’s prison term to 19 years and sent him to a harsher "special regime" facility from the maximum-security prison where he was being held.
Last month, Navalny was transferred to Polar Wolf, which is a "special regime" prison. Such facilities are considered the most strict in the Russian prison system.