On Wednesday, two days before Russian authorities reported his death, Aleksei A. Navalny was sentenced to another term in a special punishment cell in an Arctic prison, a notoriously harsh form of imprisonment generally used to force inmates into submission.
The sentencing marked the 27th time prison authorities have sent Mr. Navalny to a punishment cell, according to Kira Jarmis, his spokeswoman. If he had served the full final term, he would have spent a total of 308 days in similar cells, Ms Yarmysh said.
According to Eva Merkacheva, a Russian journalist who has covered the country’s prisons extensively, inmates in such cells are often left cold and hungry, and those conditions could explain reports of Mr. Navalny’s death.
“I think his endless transfers to a punishment cell could definitely lead to this,” Ms Merkacheva told MSK1, a news website.
Although imprisoned, Mr Navalny continued to post on social media passing notes to his visiting lawyers and had described the brutal conditions in the punishment cells.
Prison authorities used trivial offenses as reasons to punish Mr Navalny, he wrote in an Instagram post. He had been punished, he said, for wearing an unbuttoned robe, for not walking with his hands behind his back while being carried between cells, and for lack of to introduce itself properly.
In addition to spending time in a freezing, cramped cell, prisoners in the punishment cells are also limited in their ability to exercise, spending time in a tiny fenced yard with a roof made of prison bars. In his new penal colony in the Arctic, for example, Mr Navalny was only allowed outside in the mornings, when it was still dark and temperatures were at their lowest.
“It was never colder than -25°F,” Mr. Navalny he wrote on social media in January, describing his walks. “Even in this temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you have time to grow a new nose, ears and fingers.”
In his posts, Mr Navalny called his confinement in punishment cells a form of torture, although he also joked wryly that it was an opportunity for meditation.
But the harsh prison conditions damaged Mr. Navalny’s health. He was first sent to a penal colony in March 2021, a few months after being poisoned with a nerve agent that nearly killed him. After the poisoning, Mr Navalny lost significant weight and had to relearn basic movements, such as how to use his fingers with his phone.
During his first weeks in the penal colony, Mr. Navalny’s health deteriorated rapidly. Leonid Volkov, his chief of staff, said that weeks after being transferred to his first colony, Mr. Navalny suffered from acute pain in his back and legs.
While in prison, Mr Navalny said he was not receiving proper medical care and went on hunger strike to protest it. When he stopped it more than three weeks later, he said, he was left as “a walking, swaying skeleton in his cell.”
In June 2022, Mr Navalny was transferred to a tougher prison, where his spinal problems worsened, he said, because he had to spend most of his time with his movements restricted by the narrow confines of the punishment cell. Doctors who came to see him did not reveal his diagnosis, he said, adding that he was also given unknown shots.
In January 2023, Mr. Navalny’s wife, Yulia, said in an Instagram post that her husband was sick with a high fever and that instead of helping him, prison officials moved another sick person to his cell. The authorities refused to take him to a medical facility at the time, Mr Navalny said, and a group of Russian doctors wrote letters asking the authorities to treat him.
For a time, his condition improved, but weeks later an ambulance had to be called due to an acute stomach condition, Mr Navalny’s lawyer he said. Last December, Mr Navalny passed out in his cell, his spokeswoman said.
“We don’t know what it was,” she he said on social media. “But given that he is deprived of food and kept in a punishment cell with no ventilation, with minimal walks, it looks like he is collapsing from starvation.”
In December, Mr Navalny spent almost three weeks traveling through the Russian prison system and was transferred to his new penal colony in the Arctic. Upon arrival, he he said that the trip was “quite exhausting.”
