Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny revealed he has been forced to listen to the same Vladimir Putin speech for over 100 days in a row.
Mr Navalny, 47, said that prison officers have constantly played the Russian president’s 1 hour and 46 minute-long state of the nation address from February outside his prison cell.
To mark the 100th day of being played the speech, Mr Navalny tweeted that was told he would have to listen to it throughout the year as it contained “instructions on educational work”.
Despite protests by the Putin critic, Mr Navalny said guards responded by saying: “Once Putin makes his next annual address, then they’ll start playing it for us instead.”
1/5 Today is an anniversary for me. For exactly 100 days in a row now, I've been listening to the same Putin's speech from 21.02.2023 every evening (https://t.co/voBiG2nx5K).
— Alexey Navalny (@navalny) July 10, 2023
In the speech made last February, Putin repeated his claim that the “special military operation” was conducted in order to rid Ukraine of a “neo-Nazi regime”.
Putin went further to claim Russia had done everything possible to “solve the problem by peaceful means”, adding: “We were patient, we were negotiating a peaceful way out of this difficult conflict, but a completely different scenario was being prepared behind our backs.”
Mr Navalny was first arrested in 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany where he was recovering from a poison attack. He is serving a nine-year term on an embezzlement charge.
The opposition leader is being held at a maximum-security penal colony at Melekhovo and appeared in court last month, facing new allegations of creating an extremist organisation. If found guilty, he could be jailed for up to 30 years.
In a ruling earlier this year, the European Court of Human Rights found that Russia had “notably” failed to investigate Mr Navalny’s 2020 poisoning.
The court said Russia had failed “to explore the allegations of a possible political motive for the attempted murder, as well as possible involvement of state agents.”
