Kremlin spies ‘at Navalny’s prison’ days before death
Two days before Alexei Navalny was found dead at his bleak prison in the Arctic Circle, FSB officers reportedly arrived and disconnected CCTV.
Two days before Alexei Navalny was pronounced dead at the bleak “Polar Wolf” prison at Kharp, high in the Arctic Circle, several officers from the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, reportedly paid a visit – and proceeded to disconnect and dismantle some of the security cameras and listening devices there.
The visit, which activists say was mentioned in a report by the local branch of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), was not the only suspicious event surrounding the opposition leader’s death on Friday.
Equally astonishing was the speed with which the authorities announced and commented on the tragedy in the remote camp 1,200 miles (1900 kilometres) from Moscow, according to a timeline published by Gulagu.net, a human rights group. Just two minutes after the time Navalny, 47, was officially reported to have died, the prison service put out what appeared to be a prepared press release; four minutes later, a state-controlled channel on the Telegram messaging site claimed the cause of death was a blood clot, and then, a mere seven minutes after that, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, was talking to the media about it.
“This rapid timing can only mean one thing,” the human rights group claimed . “Everything was pre-planned and coordinated, right down to the FSIN press release. Minute by minute. Second by second.”
It was not immediately possible to verify the claimed visit by the FSB. Gulagu.net, founded by the campaigner Vladimir Osechkin, has contacts among political prisoners and was the first site to break the news that Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner military company, had been recruiting from jails, though it has been proven wrong at some points in the past.
Yet, as was the case with the deaths of previous thorns in Putin’s side – from Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former intelligence officer poisoned with polonium-210 in London in 2006, to Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader shot outside the Kremlin in 2015 – key details about how Navalny died may take some time to establish. A further twist came when it emerged that his mother, Lyudmila, had arrived at the morgue where authorities had claimed her son’s body had been taken, to find it was not there.
Navalny’s incarceration began in January 2021 when he returned to Russia after spending five months in Germany where he was treated for poisoning with the novichok nerve agent, suffered while crisscrossing Siberia campaigning against Putin. Polar Wolf – officially known as Correctional Facility No. 3 (IK-3) – where he arrived aboard a prison train on December 23, after “disappearing” in the Russian prison system for almost three weeks, was a very different and even grimmer place.
One of the most northerly and remote establishments in Russia, the camp, located in the Arctic tundra, is notorious for its brutal conditions.
Its location enhances the misery: in the depths of winter, the sun is up for less than two hours around midday, while the temperature can be -20C during the day and -30C at night - sometimes plunging as low as -50C. Summer, when temperatures soar, brings swarms of mosquitoes.
Navalny, predictably, made light of the hell on earth into which he had plunged. A few days after his arrival, in a thread on Twitter/X, he dubbed himself “the new Santa Claus”, with his sheepskin coat, fur hat and traditional valenki felt boots.
1/9 I am your new Santa Claus.
— Alexey Navalny (@navalny) December 26, 2023
Well, I now have a sheepskin coat, an ushanka hat (a fur hat with ear-covering flaps), and soon I will get valenki (a traditional Russian winter footwear). I have grown a beard for the 20 days of my transportation.
“I don’t say ‘Ho-ho-ho’, but I do say ‘Oh-oh-oh’ when I look out of the window, where I can see a night, then the evening, and then the night again,” he wrote.
In subsequent postings he described being confined to a cell only 11 steps from one end to the other and being woken every day at 5am by the Russian national anthem – followed invariably by I’m Russian, a popular song by Yaroslav Dronov, a pro-Putin singer who performs under the name of “Shaman”. Lights out was at 9pm. In another, on the Telegram messaging service, he wrote of the “invigorating” effect of going out at 6.30am, adding: “You can walk for more than half an hour only if you manage to grow a new nose, new ears and new fingers.”
One former inmate described being made to assemble in the courtyard in winter before being doused with water, according to testimony collected by Olga Romanova, a journalist who founded the campaigning group, Russia Behind Bars.
But were the conditions so severe that they ultimately killed Navalny?
In its statement on Friday afternoon, the prison service claimed the opposition leader “felt unwell after a walk and almost immediately lost consciousness”, adding that emergency medical workers carried out “all of the necessary resuscitation measures” but they “did not yield positive results”.
Navalny had appeared in good humour and outwardly healthy in video footage shot during a court appearance the day before his death, but there is no doubt that the after-effects of his poisoning, coupled with three years of incarceration, had taken their toll on his health.
During the early part of his time behind bars, he wrote of suffering numbness in his right leg – for which he was given only ibuprofen without being examined. By last April he was experiencing severe stomach pains and unexplained seizures.
“We cannot rule out the possibility that he is simply being ‘slowly poisoned’ so that his health does not deteriorate dramatically, but gradually and steadily,” wrote Vadim Kobzev, one of his then lawyers, on social media. A total of more than 300 days spent in solitary confinement - imposed for “offences” as minor as failing to button up his shirt properly or wash his face at the right time - also took an undoubted toll.
In its report, Gulagu.net cited claims that Navalny had spent as long as four hours in the small exercise yard on Friday at a time when the temperature was about -20C. CCTV footage would have proved if this were true. It would also have clarified whether he had walked back to his cell or had to be carried.
Past experience suggests that in Putin’s Russia, these – and other questions surrounding his death – may never be answered.
The Sunday Times
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