Imprisoned Kremlin foe Alexei Navalny says prison guards have come up with a creative new tactic to torment him: forcing him to listen to Vladimir Putin speeches over and over each night.
“Those same speeches and public addresses he gave after the start of the war against Ukraine,” a statement on Navalny’s official Telegram channel read.
“Loudspeakers hang throughout the long corridor… and Putin yells through them at such a volume that there is no escape,” he wrote.
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He said fellow prisoners are forced to endure the “torture by Putin” along with him: “Every evening there is a comical scene of prisoners dragging mattresses into their cells, and Putin in a loud voice telling them that the West wants to make Russian citizens suffer.”
Perhaps more comical, however, is that the prison guards have unwittingly admitted that “listening to Putin speak is a punishment,” he said.
“The guards themselves are forced to listen to this with me, and it’s even worse for them—they are walking along the corridor right under these speakers. In response to my cheerful questions about which speech they like the best, they keep silent: Any words will be captured on the video recorder and become known to authorities. But the look on their faces and the way they roll their eyes is a reward in itself,” he wrote.
Navalny, once seen as an opposition leader potentially capable of ousting Putin from power, was arrested in January 2021 after returning to Russia following a nerve-agent poisoning widely believed to have been carried out by the Kremlin. The 46-year-old anti-corruption campaigner, already serving a combined sentence of 11.5 years on fraud and contempt of court charges he says were concocted to shut him up, said last week that he faces an additional 30 years on “absurd” terrorism charges.
