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7 months ago
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ARTICLE AD BOX
A BRAVE ally of Alexei Navalny has been thrown into a “punishment cell” after removing his jacket at breakfast.
Ilya Yashin is already serving eight-and-a-half years in a horror Russian jail on bogus “fake news” charges after speaking out about Putin’s troubled war in Ukraine back in 2022.
AP
AP
Kremlin critic Yashin, 40, has been forced into solitary confinement for 10 days at the notorious Smolensk prison, say reports.
He is thought to have taken off his prison jacket when eating breakfast earlier this week, before being taken away by guards for the minor infraction.
Yashin’s supporters took to Telegram to call the claims he was punished for taking off his jacket as “fabricated”.
The post said he was “deliberately isolated” in an attempt to deprive him of his will and break him mentally and physically.
They noted that many political prisoners like Navalny and Yashin were thrown into solitary confinement to stop them from influencing the outside world and fellow prisoners with their anti-Kremlin views.
His supporters said: “The ongoing pressure on political prisoners, their deliberate isolation not only from the outside world but also from other prisoners is an attempt to deprive them of their will, to suppress, to break them.
“Being kept in a punishment cell is a separate ordeal. At this time it is especially important for a person not to be forgotten about.”
Previously, in my personal file only ‘malicious violator of the regime’ was listed. Now I am also a person ‘prone to studying and spreading extremism’
Ilya YashinIt was also claimed, Yashin was visited by the head of the Smolensk penal service on the day he was sent to solitary confinement.
Russia has special punishment cells in their horror jails where prisoners are stuck in cramped blocks in near 24-hour silence.
In Ilya Yashin’s latest post on his Telegram channel he said he was put on “additional preventative care” in jail.
He also claimed his personal file had been changed to label him as a person “prone to studying and spreading extremism”.
Russian prison officers have constantly panicked over the influence some political prisoners have over others.
His full post on March 4 said: “The administration put me on additional preventive care. Previously, in my personal file only ‘malicious violator of the regime’ was listed.
“Now I am also a person ‘prone to studying and spreading extremism’.
“I can only guess what this wording means. But as the guards explained, this status is connected with the ‘political nature’ of my criminal article, as well as with extremist connections.”
THE LIFE OF ILYA YASHIN
Yashin first angered Putin and his cronies in 2011 when he joined up with Navalny to lead several “Dissenters’ Marches” in Russia.
He led the small opposition People’s Freedom Party between 2012 and 2016 and was elected as a councillor in a central Moscow constituency in 2017.
During this time, Yashin built up a huge fanbase of fellow Kremlin haters and made himself an enemy of the state.
Yashin was put behind bars two years ago for reporting about the Russian army’s rape and pillage of Bucha during the terrifying invasion of Ukraine.
He spoke about the horrors of Putin’s regime on his YouTube channel but was accused of knowingly disseminating fake information about the Russian armed forces, say the BBC.
Russia’s defence ministry condemned Yashin’s comments as a fabricated “provocation” and called images of dead civilians seen in the videos as “staged”.
After the death of Navalny, Yashin said he feared for his life in prison.
WHO ELSE HAS PUTIN JAILED?
Putin’s number one critic, Alexei Navalny was imprisoned on bogus charges after years of calling out the Russian government.
He is believed to have died earlier this year, as he was being kept in solitary confinement at the brutal Polar Wolf jail.
Fierce critics of Putin slammed the Russian tyrant as “politically murdering” Navalny.
Brit Vladimir Kara-Murza, 42, was also forced into solitary confinement for not standing up fast enough at a Siberian prison.
His wife, Evgenia, said he had been transferred to a new prison and immediately placed in a punishment block in January 2024.
She said his is only crime was not standing up in time when the guard commanded him to “rise” and he was slammed with a “malicious violation”.
Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron said he was “deeply concerned” over the fate of the dissident who suffers from a nerve disorder after two poisonings he blames on the Kremlin.
Putin enemies jailed in Russia
MAD Vlad is not a man who likes to be challenged.
Those who dare to challenge the Kremlin kingpin or discredit his regime have ended up falling out of windows, shot dead in the street or booted off to hellish gulags in Siberia.
The latter is an easy option for paranoid Putin – sentence his opponents to decades behind bars. Out of sight, out of mind.
Here is a list of President Putin’s prominent enemies and critics – or just those who dared to criticise his war in Ukraine – who have been jailed in recent years:
Vladimir Kara-Murza
The British citizen, Russian dissident and opposition politician was arrested in April, 2022 after criticising Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The long-term Putin critic was sentenced to 25 years in April, 2023 – the harshest punishment of its kind since the war began.
Ilya Yashin
Yet another opposition politician who was sent to rot behind bars.
Yashin was sentenced to eight and a half years in December, 2022 on charges of spreading ‘false information’ about the army.
He was tried over a YouTube video in which he discussed evidence regarding Russian atrocities in the Ukrainian village in Bucha, near Kyiv.
Andrei Pivovarov
Pivovarov led a now-defunct activist organisation called Open Russia, which was forced to shut down after a crackdown in May, 2021.
He was jailed for four years in July, 2022 for leading the so-called ‘undesirable organisation’.
Alexei Gorinov
A smaller player than the others, Gorinov was a Moscow district councillor whose only crime was to speak out about the war once at a council meeting.
He was jailed for seven years in July, 2022 after allegedly spreading ‘lies’ about the Russian armed forces.
He told his constituents that children were ‘dying every day’ in Ukraine.
Gorinov was the first person to be jailed under Putin’s sweeping censorship laws passed eight days after the war.
Alexei Moskalyov
Next is a man who was investigated by Putin’s spooks after his 12-year-old daughter drew an anti-war picture at school in 2022.
He was then alleged to have discredited the armed forces on his own social media and sentenced to two years in jail – a vicious punishment likely intended as a warning to others.
He fled the country on the eve of the verdict but was captured in Belarus and extradited back to Russia.
Ivan Safronov
Safronov was a defence reporter who later became an adviser to the head of Russia’s space agency.
He was arrested in 2020 and sentenced to 22 years in jail over claims he disclosed state secrets – a charge that he denies, stating all the information was already in the public domain.
Critics have claimed his imprisonment was a bold warning to others as Putin cracked down on media freedoms.
Reuters
EPA
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