Navalny went on hunger strike last week to protest against prison officials’ refusal to grant him access to proper medical care. He had been suffering from acute back pain that had affected his ability to walk and his condition was being exacerbated by alleged “torture by sleep deprivation,” one of his lawyers said last month.
Navalny said the prison didn’t have the sustenance and nutrients required to keep inmates healthy, adding his temperature was recorded as 38.1 degrees Celsius (100.6 Fahrenheit) and that he had a severe cough.
In the post on Monday, Navalny also said there was a tuberculosis outbreak amongst his cellmates, with three out of the group’s 15 prisoners recently hospitalized with the disease.
“And what? Do you think there is a state of emergency, ambulance sirens are blaring? No-one cares, the bosses are worried only about how to hide the statistics,” Navalny said in the post.
‘Practically exemplary’ penal colony
In the post shared on Monday, Navalny also criticized Russian state media’s recent coverage of conditions inside the penal colony.
Last week, a film crew from Russia’s state-controlled TV network RT visited the prison with Maria Butina, a Russian gun-rights enthusiast-turned TV personality who now works for the network. The report said the prison was “practically exemplary.”
Butina was convicted of conspiring to act as an agent for a foreign state in the United States and served more than 15 months behind bars in Florida. She pleaded guilty of trying to infiltrate conservative political circles and promote Russian interests before and after the 2016 presidential election.
Navalny pushed back against RT’s assessment of the conditions.
“This is what our ‘ideal, exemplary colony’ looks like. Any prisoner prays to God not to get here, but inside there are unsanitary conditions, tuberculosis, lack of medications. Looking at the awful plates, in which they put our gruel, I am generally surprised that there is no Ebola virus here yet,” Navalny said in the Instagram post on Monday.
“I have a legally guaranteed right to invite a specialist doctor at my own expense. I will not give it up, prison doctors can be trusted just as much as state TV,” he added.
Navalny, a long-time critic of President Vladimir Putin, was jailed earlier this year for violating the probation terms of a 2014 case in which he received a suspended sentence of three and a half years. A Moscow court took into account the 11 months Navalny had already spent under house arrest as part of the decision and replaced the remainder of the suspended sentence with a prison term last month.