Alexei Navalny goes on hunger strike in protest over his jail conditions

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has announced he is on a hunger strike to protest the conditions he is experiencing in prison which have started to cause him health problems.

A new post shared on Navalny’s Instagram discussed the back pain he has been suffering with, which has now developed into pains in both his legs too.

Despite Navalny’s pleas to be allowed to see a doctor, prison authorities, after examining him last week, declared his condition to be stable and satisfactory. 

His latest Instagram post consists of a letter he has written and in it, Navalny, 44, asked why prison inmates go on hunger strikes, before confirming that he had begun one himself.

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny (pictured, in 2020) has announced he is on a hunger strike to protest the conditions he is experiencing in prison which have started to cause him health problems

In an the most recent post published on his account, Navalny describes how he has gone on a hunger strike to demand he be allowed to see a doctor to treat him for his back and leg pains

In the post, shared by his team, Navalny said: ‘I have the right to call a doctor and get medicine. They don’t give me either one or the other. The back pain has moved to the leg. Areas of the right and now the left leg have lost sensitivity. 

‘Jokes aside, but this is already annoying.’

He also repeated his claims that his requests for medical assistance were being ignored by prison guards and that he was being ‘tortured’ with sleep deprivation with guards waking him up eight times a night.

Navalny also claimed that other prisoners are being intimidated into not helping clean areas around his bed.

‘Well, that’s what to do?’ he asked. ‘I went on a hunger strike demanding that the law be obeyed and that a visiting doctor be allowed to visit me. So I’m lying hungry, but so far with two legs.’

Earlier this week, Navalny warned he potentially faces being locked in solitary confinement after being accused of numerous minor infractions in prison.

Navalny is serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence for violating his parole in a 2014 fraud case.

In a post to Instagram, uploaded via his lawyers on Monday, Navalny shared a picture of himself from prison – a grainy image showing his head had been shaved.

In an earlier Instagram post, Navalny said he could be locked up in solitary confinement after being accused of numerous minor infractions in prison

More than 20 medical professionals on Sunday published an open letter demanding the 44-year-old opposition politician get proper care.

‘We fear for the worst. Leaving a patient in this condition … may lead to severe consequences, including an irreversible, full or partial loss of lower limb functions,’ the letter said.

He said in the same post he had been given six reprimands in the space of two weeks at the IK-2 corrective penal colony 100 km (60 miles) east of Moscow. Two reprimands are technically enough to be sent to a punishment cell, he said.

‘It’s an unpleasant joke,’ Navalny wrote. ‘The conditions there [in solitary] are close to torture.’

Navalny, 44, is serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence for violating his parole in a 2014 fraud case at the IK-2 corrective penal colony 100 km (60 miles) east of Moscow [File photo]

The reprimands mean that Navalny is no longer eligible for early parole, his lawyers said last Thursday.

The prison did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters news agency for comment.    

He was arrested as he returned to Russia from Germany in January, where he had been recovering from what doctors said was poisoning with a nerve agent.

The West, including the European Court of Human Rights, has demanded that Russia release Navalny.