Jailed Navalny ally sent to solitary for removing his jacket at breakfast

The jailed Russian opposition figure Ilya Yashin, an ally of the late Alexei Navalny, has been thrown into solitary confinement because he took off his jacket at breakfast.

Mr Yashin, 40, is one of Moscow’s most high-profile political prisoners.

He was sent to prison for eight and a half years in 2022 for reporting on his YouTube channel about the Russian army’s rape and pillage of Bucha outside Kyiv during the opening weeks of the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.

A group of Mr Yashin’s supporters said on Telegram that the Smolensk prison where he is being held was visited by the head of the region’s penal service and that Mr Yashin was punished shortly afterwards.

They described the rule about keeping your prison jacket on while eating as “fabricated”.

The real reason he has been sent to solitary for 10 days “is the ongoing pressure on political prisoners, their deliberate isolation not only from the outside world but also from other prisoners, an attempt to deprive them of their will, to suppress, to break them,” they said.

“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.”

Russia’s cramped and solitary punishment cells are designed to break prisoners. Visits and contact with other prisoners are banned during the time.

Mr Yashin led the small opposition People’s Freedom Party between 2012 and 2016 and was elected in a 2017 municipal election as a councillor in a central Moscow constituency.

After the death of Navalny, Russia’s best-known opposition figure, in a Siberian prison in February, Mr Yashin said that he feared for his life in the notoriously brutal and dangerous penal system that is based on the Soviet Union’s Gulags.

Navalny and Mr Yashin were allies, co-leading several “Dissenters’ Marches” between 2011 and 2013 that angered the Kremlin. The West accused the Kremlin of murdering Navalny, although Russian officials have denied this and said instead that he died of a heart attack.