Kremlin Spy and Ex-U.S. Convict Sent to Humiliate Navalny in Prison
DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty ImagesMOSCOW—Russia’s imprisoned 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 every hour at night. Independent prison observers have been desperate to check up on him, with hundreds of Russian public figures sending open letters and petitions to authorities, calling for a halt to the humiliating treatment. Human rights activists addressed the Kremlin on Friday more bluntly: “He is being slowly killed.”The response? 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 U.S. ex-convict. Now a pro-Kremlin activist, Butina pleaded guilty in a U.S. court in 2018 to acting as a Russian agent while infiltrating the NRA and Republican Party political circles.Butina reported what she had heard from other inmates in the prison colony, called IK-2, complaining not about conditions in the prison, but about Navalny himself. Butina said other inmates despised Navalny’s for “lying in bed all day “like a master,” and said he “does not clean after himself.” She insisted that Navalny was living in better conditions than she had endured in an American jail. “My recommendation to Aleksey: if you committed a crime, be a man, serve your time.”Read more at The Daily Beast.
Read More
