Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned Russian opposition leader who survived an assassination attempt believed to have been orchestrated by the Kremlin, says he is suffering from worsening back pain after months in solitary confinement in a penal colony.
Mr Navalny said in a series of messages on Twitter on Monday that he had been injected with unknown drugs that failed to relieve pain, accusing authorities of deliberately withholding his medical records from him.
“If you lock someone up in a punishment cell, where they can stand or sit on an iron stool for 16 hours a day, even a healthy person is bound to have back pain after a month in such conditions,” Navalny said. wrote on Twitter. “I have spent the last 3 months like this. My back obviously hurts a lot.”
Mr Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021 after recovering from an assassination attempt in a Berlin hospital and was promptly arrested. Weeks later, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for violating the terms of his previous parole while in Germany. He was sentenced to a new nine-year prison sentence in March in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine after prosecutors accused him of embezzling donations from his supporters.
Mr. Navalny became Russia’s most prominent opposition leader by denouncing high-level corruption and challenging President Vladimir V. Putin and his United Russia party. White House officials have said US intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian security agents poisoned Mr. Navalny.
In his Twitter posts, Mr. Navalny that prison authorities should not use blunt physical force against him, but that they used other means to make him obey, including forcing him to share a cell with a filthy inmate.
This month he was sentenced to 12 days in prison for using a swear word in a conversation with his cellmate, the ninth sentence in the past six months, he said.
After repeated requests for medical attention, a doctor appeared, he said in a post. He was not given a diagnosis, he said, and he wasn’t sure what kind of medication he had been given.
Mr Navalny said weeks after requesting his medical records in an attempt to see his diagnosis and what he had been prescribed, he finally received them. He confirmed what appeared to be the documents to his post, which revealed they had been copied in a way that rendered them nearly illegible.
Mr. Navalny has remained active while imprisoned in Russia’s notorious Penal Colony No. 2, regularly posting updates on his time there and comments on the political and economic situation in Russia.
His political organization, which several years ago had offices and activists in all major Russian cities, has been wiped out by the authorities. All top leaders have fled and many activists have been arrested.