Leaked emails show how prison officials deliberately made Navalny’s life unbearable — and then tried to cover their tracks
Meduza has gained access to hundreds of emails between employees of Correctional Facility No. 6 (abbreviated IK-6) in Russia’s Vladimir region, where the late opposition politician Alexey Navalny spent the majority of his time in prison. (In December 2023, Navalny was transferred to a prison in the Arctic village of Kharp, where he was held until his death in February 2024.) The newly obtained documents suggest prison officials took deliberate measures to make Navalny’s life in prison unbearable. They also reveal these officials’ efforts to cover their tracks — for example, by thinking up various contradictory justifications for violations that led Navalny and his lawyers to sue the authorities. Much of what these messages reveal may seem obvious; nonetheless, their release is important in gaining a clearer understanding of Navalny’s imprisonment.
Where did these documents come from?
In early August 2024, an anonymous source gave Meduza a trove of emails from the inbox of Ilya Kruglyshev, a lawyer who represents the IK-6 penal colony in Russia’s Vladimir region, where Alexey Navalny was held from June 2022 until December 2023. He asked only that we not share Kruglyshev’s email address.
These several hundred emails, most of which directly concerned Navalny, were sent between May 2021 and February 2024. A significant share of the documents are responses from the prison’s administration to the numerous lawsuits filed by Navalny and his lawyers; Kruglyshev stored these in a special folder called “Navaly” (sic). Each response represents the prison administration’s official position regarding Navalny’s complaints. The leak also contains accompanying documents to the responses, including the texts of the lawsuits and court rulings, medical certificates, character references, and prisoner visitation logs.
Who is Ilya Kruglyshev?
Ilya Kruglyshev has worked in Russia’s federal prison service for over two decades. In a performance report that Kruglyshev wrote on his department’s behalf in 2023, he described himself as follows:
In difficult situations, [Kruglyshev] remains calm and resourceful, acting in accordance with the law and the best interests of the Federal Penitentiary Service. He makes the right legal decisions within the required time frame and efficiently communicates relevant information to the concerned parties.
The lawyer also mentions his role in the court proceedings related to Navalny’s lawsuits and the “methodological assistance” he’s provided to prisons in the Vladimir region. According to Kruglyshev’s own calculations, as of November 2023, Navalny had 84 active lawsuits, all of which Kruglyshev was handling on the prison’s behalf.
During the period when Kruglyshev represented the prison in court in Navalny’s lawsuits, he was promoted to the rank of Internal Service colonel — despite not having the required five years of service at his previous rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
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How prison officials falsified documents to respond to Navalny’s lawsuits
As part of his defense of IK-6 in Navalny’s lawsuits, Kruglyshev prepared numerous documents to be used as evidence in court. In multiple cases, the emails obtained by Meduza include several different versions of the same document, showing how officials changed them over time.
One example concerns Navalny’s transfer out of the Vladimir region in late 2023. When the politician stopped appearing in court hearings via video link in early December, prison officials initially attributed his absence to power outages at the facility. Soon, however, Navalny’s lawyers were informed that their client was no longer at IK-6 at all. It wasn’t until three weeks later, on December 25, that Navalny’s associates learned he’d been transferred to a high-security prison in the Arctic village of Kharp.
Dmitry Nozhkin, the head of IK-6, sent a formal explanation for the transfer to the courts hearing Navalny’s lawsuits: According to this version, Navalny was transferred to Kharp because his new sentence was coming into force. However, the original document signed by Nozhkin didn’t include this claim; it said that IK-6 had received instructions for Navalny’s transfer from the Federal Penitentiary Service. By removing this detail from the final version, the prison staff concealed it from Navalny’s lawyers — and as a result, his defense team didn’t know to request a copy of the instructions, unaware of their existence.
Kruglyshev’s communications with the IK-6 administration show how prison staff tried to justify their efforts to worsen Navalny’s detention conditions deliberately. They sometimes sent Kruglyshev multiple accounts of incidents involving the prisoner.
In October 2023, for example, Kruglyshev received an email from an unnamed prison employee with the subject line “Walk 22.09.2023 versions for approval.” Attached to the message were documents containing two different explanations for why prison staff unlawfully denied Navalny his daily walk on one of the days he was placed in solitary confinement. (Navalny was now suing over the violation.)
In the first explanation, the prison administration cited “adherence to the daily routine,” claiming that Navalny was brought to his cell at 9:18 a.m. and that outdoor time for inmates in solitary confinement is only allowed between 8:40 a.m. and 9:40 a.m. The second explanation, meanwhile, attributes the denial of Navalny’s outdoor time to “exclusively the will of convict A. A. Navalny”:
On September 22, 2023, outdoor time was not granted to the administrative plaintiff due to the plaintiff’s refusal to go outside during the remaining time allocated for outdoor activity, as stipulated by the daily routine, which is confirmed by the log of prisoners’ outdoor activities.
How prison officials surveilled Navalny’s lawyers
Other documents from Kruglyshev’s inbox show that prison officials at IK-6 were closely tracking the online posts Navalny would make through his lawyers while he was in prison. To find out how the politician sent these posts to his associates, prison censors analyzed his written communications with his friends and family members, including 462 letters and 45 telegrams sent to Navalny and 31 letters that he sent himself.
To their dismay, prison officials could not find any information “about the conditions of the detention of the convict A. A. Navalny in the correctional facility [or] about the disciplinary measures applied to him.” Additionally, by listening to Navalny’s conversations with his mother, Lyudmila, and his wife, Yulia, the staff concluded that he didn’t mention these topics even during phone calls.
Based on this, the prison’s warden concluded that Navalny’s lawyers were delivering the politician’s messages to “unidentified people” who were “acting on Navalny’s behalf” — in other words, his associates at the Anti-Corruption Foundation. “The transfer of the specified information to convict A. A. Navalny through other possible channels was not possible and did not occur,” Nozhkin wrote in a decree imposing additional censorship on Navalny.
In September 2022, IK-6 established complete control over Navalny’s communications with his lawyers. The prison’s administration released a decree for the letters and other messages exchanged by the politician and his attorneys to be monitored, and as a result, some letters and telegrams from Navalny’s lawyers stopped reaching him altogether.
The formal justification for these measures was that the extra censorship would help “fight against crime” by preventing “crimes against the foundations of the constitutional order and state security” that Navalny and his associates were allegedly “planning.”
A few weeks later, an amendment was added to the decree. It held that if prison staff discovered materials in the possession of Navalny’s lawyers that were “not related to providing legal assistance,” they were required to return them to Navalny. Whether a document met the criteria was left to the discretion of prison employees.
If a lawyer refused to show documents unrelated to Navalny’s case, they could leave them “in a specially equipped locked cabinet” until passing through the checkpoint. However, they were not allowed to see Navalny if they cited attorney-client privilege and refused to “present for inspection” documents related to his case.
This new policy created the formal grounds for IK-6 employees to inspect all of the documents Navalny’s lawyers brought with them to the prison, both before and after they met with him. In reality, however, they’d been doing this since he first arrived at the facility. “Fundamentally, nothing changed [after the decree came into effect],” Navalny’s lawyer Olga Mikhailova told Meduza. “They continued inspecting and photographing all documents.”
In early September 2022, the prison made it even harder for Navalny’s lawyers to communicate with him: they covered up the acrylic glass window separating lawyers from their clients in the facility’s meeting room and removed the slot for passing documents back and forth. According to Mikhailova, this made it “impossible to work”:
He [Navalny] could only see our outlines, and we could only see his. There was a small area [that wasn’t covered] at the bottom of the acrylic glass, but it had been deliberately scratched with sandpaper.
On October 13, 2023, three of Navalny’s lawyers — Vadim Kobzev, Alexey Liptser, and Igor Serguhin — were arrested. Arrest warrants were later issued for two more of his lawyers, Alexander Fedulov and Olga Mikhailov, who had left Russia. All five were charged with “participating in an extremist organization”; investigators accused them of facilitating communications between Navalny and his associates at the Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Officials at IK-6 inspected all of the documents in the possession of Navalny’s lawyers when they entered and exited the prison for almost two years, a source familiar with the case proceedings told Meduza:
You could say that the extremism, which didn’t actually exist, was committed with support from Federal Penitentiary Service employees. They closely examined all of the lawyers’ papers, including those with drafts of online posts, and allowed all of them to be transmitted [to the outside world]. They inspected all the documents, checked everything, and didn’t stop anything — and then they said it was a crime.
Olga Mikhailova corroborated this account, telling Meduza: “We never handed over a single piece of paper [to Navalny] that had not been checked by the prison staff, and during the entire time, not a single document was seized from us. There was no exchange of ‘extremist information’; everything took place under the constant supervision of the Federal Penitentiary Service.”
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Navalny’s detention conditions
In March 2023, Navalny’s team added Ilya Kruglyshev to their Black Book website, where they’ve maintained a registry of Russian officials “responsible for politically motivated lawlessness” since 2016. According to them, he was the designer of the “torturous conditions” imposed on Navalny and is responsible for the politician being placed in various types of “punishment cells,” including solitary confinement, under fabricated pretexts. In March 2024, after Navalny’s death, the E.U. imposed sanctions on Kruglyshev.
When Navalny was first brought to IK-6, he was examined by a local paramedic who noted his chronic conditions in a medical report: cholecystitis, pancreatitis, gastritis, and osteochondrosis (Meduza is unable to confirm whether these conditions were indeed chronic).
In addition, during the examination, the paramedic recorded a significant increase in blood pressure: 140/90. According to clinical guidelines that doctors in Russia are required to follow, this could be a sign of hypertension and an indication to start drug treatment. Navalny wasn’t given medication to reduce his blood pressure at IK-6, according to medical documents found among Kruglyshev’s leaked emails.
Despite this, state investigators later named a “critical increase in blood pressure” as the “trigger” for the “combination of illnesses” that allegedly led to Navalny’s death in February 2024.
In the more than two years he lived in Russian prisons, Navalny spent more than 300 days in solitary confinement. In IK-6, he was sent to solitary 23 separate times. Before each trip, he was examined by prison medical staff, who proceeded to declare him “fit for detention” in ShIZO punitive isolation cells.
Meduza has obtained 22 of these medical reports. They show that Navalny was found to have hypertension before being sent to solitary confinement on at least five different occasions. While his blood pressure (130/80) didn’t reach crisis levels, Russian clinical guidelines recommend that patients at risk of cardiovascular disease receive treatment if their blood pressure reaches this level.
At the same time, the reports show that Navalny regularly complained to doctors about pain in his back, stomach, and hands. His lawyer, Vadim Kobzev, wrote about deteriorating health during this period: according to him, Navalny lost eight kilograms (17.6 pounds) and suffered from constant stomach pain. On one occasion, he lost consciousness, prompting prison officials to call an ambulance, though no additional tests were ordered in the hospital, and no independent doctors were allowed to see Navalny. According to his lawyer, Olga Mikhailova, independent doctors were prevented from entering all of the prisons where Navalny was held.
“Listen, I don’t want to sound paranoid, but it seems that they’re poisoning me here,” Navalny said to Mikhailova on April 11, 2023, the last time she saw him. According to Navalny’s prison diaries, he said something similar to his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, when she visited him at the Vladimir region’s IK-2 prison in March 2022:
On her first extended visit, we walked down a corridor and spoke at a spot as far removed as possible from the cameras wired for sound tucked in all over the place. I whispered in her ear, “Listen, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I think there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here. Even if everything starts falling apart, they will bump me off at the first sign the regime is collapsing. They will poison me.”
According to reporting by The Insider, an early version of the Russian authorities’ document explaining their refusal to investigate Navalny’s death stated that he vomited and complained of “sharp abdominal pain” in his final hours. However, the official document sent to Yulia Navalnaya does not mention these symptoms. The Dossier Center has reported that investigators likely explored the possibility that Navalny was poisoned, though what they discovered remains unknown.
Story by Denis Dmitriev and Svetlana Reiter. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.