Russia's most famous political prisoner is to be transferred to a penal colony with stricter rules.

There he can receive fewer visitors, food packages and letters and is even more isolated.

A Moscow court on Tuesday upheld the nine-year prison sentence imposed on Alexei Navalny in March in such a facility in an appeal.

Frederick Smith

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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The trial dealt with allegations of fraud and disregard for judges, which the human rights defenders at Memorial (who themselves have been harassed by recent dissolution decisions, among other things) see as part of a political persecution of Navalnyj.

They are calling for those responsible for the "illegal prosecution" of the opposition leader to be held accountable.

Navalny returned to Russia in January last year after being treated in Germany for the Novichok poison attack that nearly killed him in August 2020.

He was arrested at the airport.

Navalny has been held in a penal colony in the small town of Pokrov, a hundred kilometers east of Moscow, since spring 2021.

There he is repeatedly subjected to new criminal proceedings, and also on Tuesday another Moscow court confirmed Navalnyj's inclusion on a list of "terrorists and extremists".

At the beginning of May, the prisoner wrote about his lawyers on Instagram that a “prison within a prison” was being prepared for him in the Melechowo penal colony, which is 150 kilometers east of Pokrov – although the verdict in the case of fraud and disregard for a judge was not yet final .

Navalny criticizes the judiciary

Navalnyj was connected to the court hearing on Tuesday via video connection from the Pokrov penal colony.

In his closing remarks, he said that the judge in the trial, Margarita Kotova, repeatedly called an employee of the presidential administration during the trial, "made no impression" on the appeals court.

These contacts were revealed by his colleagues from the Anti-Corruption Foundation (banned in Russia as “extremist”).

Navalny reiterated that he was not afraid of the court or of "grandfather in the bunker," as he calls the foreclosed President Vladimir Putin.

"I call on everyone not to be afraid, because this is a crime against themselves." In recent years, no one has killed more Russians than Putin, Navalnyj said, referring to the war in Ukraine.

He also recalled that commanding officers of the National Guard from the Vladimir region, where Pokrov and Melekhovo are located, were killed at the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

Addressing the three judges around the chairwoman Maria Dovschenko and the other representatives of power, Navalnyj said, “your time will pass.

You will burn in hell, and your grandfathers will get the wood for it, who did not want you to start new wars in the 21st century.”

Navalnyj also put the war at the center of the article on Putin that he wrote for "Time" as a guest author;

the American magazine selected the Russian president as one of the hundred most influential people of the year and asked Navalny to write a few lines about it.

The prisoner wrote that Putin “again reminded us that a path that begins with 'just a little election fraud' always ends in dictatorship.

And dictatorship always leads to war.” One shouldn't have forgotten that, said Navalnyj.

However, leading politicians around the world have long spoken of a “pragmatic approach” and the advantages of international action.

Putin a "madman"

"It enabled them to profit from Russian oil and gas while Putin's grip on power tightened." But the current war will cost hundreds of times more than the lucrative oil and gas deals would have brought in.

Putin reminded that if something looks like a duck, swims like a duck and croaks like a duck, "it's probably a duck," Navalny said.

The same logic applies to Putin: “If someone destroys the independent media, organizes political assassinations and indulges in imperial delusions, then he is a madman who can wreak bloodbath in the center of Europe in the 21st century.

And you really shouldn't welcome him to international forums." Now the most important question is, "how to confront an evil madman with an army,

Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said of this year's Time list, whose contribution to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was written by American President Joe Biden, there was "a lot of strange things".

So it is "incomprehensible" why the American President "is put on a line with a Russian prisoner".