Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has said he has been forced to listen to the same speech by Vladimir Putin for 100 days in a row for “educational reasons”.
The arch-Kremlin critic was convicted of fraud and contempt of court charges in March last year and sentenced to a further nine years behind bars at a maximum security prison. Mr Navalny and his supporters say the charges are bogus and politically motivated.
In a statement issued by his lawyers, Mr Navalny said prison guards have forced him to listen to the Russian president’s state of the nation address through a loudspeaker every night for months. During the speech, Mr Putin baselessly claimed that the West was seeking a “global confrontation” to destroy Russia.
He claimed that Western sanctions imposed on Moscow for its illegal invasion of Ukraine had backfired and Russian culture was under “attack.
Mr Navalny posted a letter to his Instagram account which he said was from the prison service, saying that he was being forced to listen to the speech to ensure his “respectful attitude to society, work, and the norms and rules of human behaviour”.
“Are you not right in the head? Put on a different Putin [speech], hasn’t he given enough?” Mr Navanlny said he told the prison guards. They responded by saying that the speech, delivered to the Russian parliament in February, would be played every day until the president delivers his next address, due in 2025.
Mr Navalny is serving his nine-year sentence for fraud and contempt of court in a maximum security penal colony in Melekhovo - about 250km (150m) east of Moscow. He is also charged with extremism and could face at least two more decades if he is found guilty.
Last month Russia’s supreme court rejected a lawsuit by Mr Navalny contesting prison regulations that allow prison officials to deprive him of stationery and pens.
He complained that prison officials in the restricted housing unit, where he is held in isolation, no longer gave him a pen and paper.
“Some are being given a pen and paper for an hour. In some places, for 15 minutes, and a convict needs a week to finish a letter. In my case, the time for writing materials was removed from my schedule entirely. How come? The prison chief decided so, that’s how,” he wrote in a typically sardonic social media post on the eve of the hearing.
The complaint is one of many the 47-year-old politician has filed against prison officials, alleging multiple violations of his rights as a convict. All of his lawsuits and petitions have been rejected by Russian courts.
Navalny in court— (AP)
Mr Navalny, a lawyer and anti-corruption activist, has proved repeatedly to be a thorn in the side of Mr Putin ever since he rose to prominence in protests against the president in 2011-12.
His investigations into Kremlin corruption have racked up tens of millions of views online. He and his team published a report back in 2021 linking an opulent mansion on the Black Sea to the president.
‘Putin’s palace’ was likened to France’s Palace of Versailles. Mr Navalny and his team allege the mansion is worth £1bn ($1.37bn) and was paid for "with the largest bribe in history".
A film of the property - which is allegedly equipped with its own ice hockey rink - has racked up 127 million views on Youtube. It helped to fuel protests in cities across Russia at the time, in what were the largest demonstrations against Mr Putin’s rule in years.
Mr Navalny’s team alleges the property was financed by billionaires close to the Russian president who received it as a gift. Mr Putin earlier this week rubbished those claims, saying that neither he nor his family owns it.
Russian oligarch Arkady Rotenberg, a billionaire with close ties to the Kremlin, later came forward to say he became the "beneficiary" of the opulent mansion "a few years ago".
Mr Navalny was blocked from standing for president in 2018 and survived an assassination attempt with a Soviet-era nerve agent in 2020 he blamed on the Kremlin, He was arrested in January 2021 upon his return to Moscow after recuperating in Germany following the attack.
