Kremlin foe Navalny says he's been put in a punishment cell in an Arctic prison colony

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said on January 9 that officials at the Arctic penal colony where he is serving a 19-year sentence have isolated him in a tiny punishment cell over a minor infraction, the latest step designed to ramp up pressure on President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest political foe.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said on January 9 that officials at the Arctic penal colony where he is serving a 19-year sentence have isolated him in a tiny punishment cell over a minor infraction, the latest step designed to ramp up pressure on President Vladimir Putin's fiercest political foe.

Mr. Navalny said in a social media statement relayed from behind bars that prison officials accused him of refusing to “introduce himself in line with protocol” and ordered him to serve seven days in a punishment cell.

”The thought that Mr. Putin will be satisfied with sticking me into a barracks in the far north and will stop torturing me in the punishment confinement was not only cowardly but naive as well," he said in his usual sardonic manner.

Mr. Navalny, 47, is jailed on charges of extremism. He had been imprisoned in the Vladimir region of central Russia, about 230 kilometers (140 miles) east of Moscow but was transferred last month to a “special regime” penal colony — the highest security level of prisons in Russia — above the Artic Circle.

His allies decried the transfer to a colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometres (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow, as yet another attempt to force Navalny into silence.

The remote region is notorious for long and severe winters. Kharp is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Vorkuta, whose coal mines were part of the Soviet gulag prison-camp system.

“It is almost impossible to get to this colony; it is almost impossible to even send letters there. This is the highest possible level of isolation from the world,” Mr. Navalny’s chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, has said on X, formerly known as Twitter.