Alexei Navalny’s jailers are tightening the screws

ALEXEI NAVALNY does not complain easily. The leading Russian opposition politician, who survived a poisoning attempt in 2020 and has been imprisoned since January 2021, treats his jailers with defiance and irony. In June he was transferred from a penal colony to a maximum-security prison notorious for its brutality. He is now locked behind a six-metre-tall fence with murderers. Suffering from a bad back, he spends seven-hour shifts seated at a sewing machine on a stool below knee height. To see a lawyer, he must skip a meal.

The goal, according to Leonid Volkov, Mr Navalny’s chief of staff, is to isolate him and physically cripple him. “This is all very serious and very dangerous,” he wrote, even if Mr Navalny himself used his trade-mark light style to describe the darkness of his situation. “I live like Putin,” Mr Navalny wrote in his latest social-media message, posted via his lawyers. “I have a loudspeaker in my barracks that plays songs like ‘Glory to the FSB’, and I think Putin does too.”