Navalny seen on video in first court appearance since transfer to brutal Arctic prison

Alexei Navalny has made his first court appearance since his transfer to a maximum security Arctic penal colony in Russia’s far north, where the outspoken Vladimir Putin critic has been sent to serve a 19-year sentence.

Navalny’s team said he had been moved to the remote penal colony dubbed “Polar Wolf” after he briefly went missing last month.

The opposition politician cracked jokes in his first court appearance on Wednesday since being transferred from a prison in Melekhovo, east of Moscow, in an arduous three-week journey by road and rail.

Navalny is suing the Russian prison authorities for mistreatment and joked that he was naive to expect Mr Putin to stop at shuttling him off to the Arctic.

“The thought that 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,” said the 47-year-old, who has been jailed on charges of extremism that he says are politically motivated.

Navalny drew laughter from the judge when he asked if a karaoke party had been thrown at the Melekhovo facility to celebrate his departure.

Outlining the abusive treatment he has received in prison, he said officials at his new jail accused him of refusing to “introduce himself in line with protocol” and ordered him to serve seven days in a punishment cell.

The judge ultimately rejected his complaint that authorities had acted illegally by sending him to an isolation cell in October for insulting a prison inspector.

His chief strategist Leonid Volkov said that the Kremlin has thrown Navalny in a secluded colony which cannot be accessed easily.

“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,” he said.

One of the fiercest critics of the Putin regime in Russia, Navalny was previously imprisoned in central Russia’s Vladimir region, 230km east of Moscow. However last month, he was transferred to another colony above the Arctic Circle which has the highest level of security of all prisons in Russia.

Navalny’s social media account showed a photo – presumably of him with his back turned towards the camera – facing a closed-off concrete yard with the caption: “In the photo below, you can see my walking yard. 11 steps from the wall and 3 to the wall – not much to walk, but at least there’s something, so I go for a walk.”

Being in a punishment cell means that walking outside in the narrow concrete prison yard is only allowed at 6.30am, he said.

“Few things are as refreshing as a walk in Yamal at 6:30 in the morning. And what a wonderful fresh breeze that blows into the courtyard despite the concrete fence, it’s just wow!”

“It’s never been colder than -25°Fahrenheit (minus 32 degrees Celsius). Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you have time to grow a new nose, ears, and fingers,” he joked from the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region, about 1,900 km (1200 miles) northeast of Moscow, his supporters said on December 25.

“Today I went for a walk, froze, and thought of Leonardo DiCaprio and his character’s dead horse trick in the movie ’The Revenant’. I do not think that it would have worked here. A dead horse would freeze to death in about 15 minutes,” his account posted.

Inmates in regular conditions are allowed to walk “after lunch, and even though it is the polar night right now, still after lunch it is warmer by several degrees,” he said.

The transfer to a colony in Kharp, just 100km from Vorkuta whose coal mines were part of the Soviet gulag prison-camp system, was decried by his allies who called it yet another attempt by the Kremlin to make Navalny suffer and further pushed into silence.

The remote region is notorious for long and severe winters.

Navalny was thrown behind bars in January 2021 after he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. He had aggressively campaigned against official corruption and organised major anti-Kremlin protests before his arrest.

Until his shuffle last month, Navalny was serving time at Penal Colony number 6 in the Vladimir region, and officials there regularly placed him in a punishment cell for alleged minor infractions. He spent months in isolation.

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