Navalny associates blacklist penal colony employees responsible for tormenting politician

The imprisoned Russian politician Alexey Navalny is enduring increasingly severe and deliberately inhumane treatment in the Melekhovo penal colony where he is serving his sentence.

Lately, his ordeal was made worse by the ultra-bright LED lights installed in his six-by-ten-foot “punishment cell.” The colony’s administration appears determined to keep Navalny in a penal cell indefinitely, in spite of the law that limits confinement in a “ShIZO” to 15 days.

Navalny Team has now identified the specific people who are doing everything to make the politician’s prison life unbearable. In a video published on Navalny Live YouTube channel, its host Ruslan Shaveddinov said that the Russian President Vladimir Putin is “trying to get rid of Navalny” with the help of the prison’s administration.

The list compiled by Navalny Team includes the following officials:

• Colonel Dmitry Nozhkin, director of the Sixth penal colony in Melekhovo;
• Lieutenant Colonel Yury Fomin;
• Lieutenant Mikhail Neimovich, who, according to Navalny Live, “watches Navalny’s every step.”

Dmitry Nozhkin and Yury Fomin, Navalny Team claims, have organized and implemented “a complex of torture-like conditions” that violate the politician’s rights, including the right to defense.

Shaveddinov also listed members of a special committee behind Navalny’s cyclical confinement in a punishment cell. According to Navalny Team, they are:

• Captain Danila Sinyukhin;
• Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry Makorin;
• Major Anatoly Gorshkov;
• Captain Nikolay Morkovkin;
• Captain Artyom Markeyev;
• Major Roman Vukolov;
• Major Vladimir Polishchuk;
• Major Svetlana Balashova;
• Lieutenant Daria Shvetsova.

Officials identified for deliberately tormenting Navalny have now been added to Navalny Team’s Black Book.