MOSCOW – The Russian opposition leader, Aleksey Navalny, is on a hunger strike in a notorious penal colony. He says he suffers from back pain, while prison guards ‘torture’ him by waking him up every hour during the night. Independent prison observers were desperate to monitor him, with hundreds of Russian public figures sending open letters and petitions to authorities calling for an end to the humiliating treatment. Human rights activists spoke more bluntly to the Kremlin on Friday: “He is slowly being killed.”
The answer? Instead of sending an independent human rights observer or a doctor to visit Navalny in prison, the Kremlin sent Maria Butina, a Russian spy and an American ex-con. Now a pro-Kremlin activist, Butina pleaded guilty to a U.S. court in 2018 for acting as a Russian agent while infiltrating the NRA and Republican Party political circles.
Butina shared what she had heard from other inmates in the prison colony called IK-2 and complained, not about the conditions in the prison, but about Navalny herself. Butina said other inmates despised Navalny for “laying in bed all day like a master” and said he “doesn’t clean himself.” She insisted that Navalny lived in better conditions than she had endured in a US prison. “My recommendation to Aleksey: if you have committed a crime, be a man, serve your time.”
Butina also posted a video clip showing Navalny pacing slowly in his barrack: “He’s walking! Oh, this is magic! With a cup of coffee, ”she remarked. Mr. Navalny had said his legs were numb from the back pain.
Butina said Navalny was rude to her during their approximately 20-minute talk, accusing her of lying and theft. A transcript of the alleged dialogue with Navalny was published on Telegram, with Butina saying, “You know full well that if you’re not cleaning, someone is cleaning for you. I have been in prison. I know it will be someone else’s responsibility. Navalny supposedly responded by telling her she lies a lot, and that “everything [she says] are endless lies, including your stories about the American prison. “
Human rights defenders were in shock. “The moment Navalny clearly needs professional medical attention, they are sending a crew from an RT state television to that penal colony – this is an unacceptable situation,” Tanya Lokshina, director of Russia’s Human Rights Watch program, told The Daily Beast. .
The rules do not prohibit an outside doctor from providing care in the prison, Lokshina explained, adding that her team is “aware of cases where the Russian prison system has provided civilian doctors for sick prisoners.”
Butina’s comments horrified a former IK-2 prisoner, Vladimir Pereverzin, who had served there for seven years, describing the experience as a total nightmare.
“It’s hard to imagine anything more cynical and misleading,” Pereverzin, who was carried away and imprisoned a decade ago after a crackdown by an oil company, told the Daily Beast. “Nobody is allowed to stay in bed in that prison. If she says he stays in bed all the time, it means he’s so sick the prison doctor allowed it. ”
“The prison guards have continually humiliated me,” he added. “They made up reports against me, so like Navalny, I had to go on a hunger strike. I even stabbed myself in the stomach and only then did they move me to a single cell, which was a huge relief. “
An opposition playwright and satirist, Viktor Shenderovich, said Butina’s visit symbolized a general tone of derision in the Kremlin’s policies.
“The government decided to kill Navalny in order to destroy him both physically and morally,” Shenderovich told the Daily Beast. “This is not a political move, but a moral one: Russia is currently divided between clear supporters of the good and those who support evil.”
Shenderovich described the Butina ordeal as a “victory” for Kremlin loyalists.
“Many Kremlin supporters now giggle when they read Butina’s comments,” he said. “They are happy to see the Kremlin dragging and mocking the supporters of the West and Navalny. But actually this is the humiliation of morality itself. “