Imprisoned Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny has filed a lawsuit against his prison's warden, accusing him of illegally placing the outspoken Kremlin critic in punitive solitary confinement.
The Kovrov City Court in the Vladimir region said on September 5 that it registered the lawsuit filed by Navalny against the warden, Yury Korobov, of Penal Colony No. 6, about 260 kilometers east of Moscow.
Navalny claims in the lawsuit that he was unnecessarily placed in punitive confinement for a partially unbuttoned prison suit.
A punitive cell in Russia's penitentiary system is a tiny concrete room with no toilet or running water.
Since mid-August, Navalny has been placed in a punitive cell three times -- for an unbuttoned prison suit, for failing to carry out a guard's command to put his hand behind his back in a timely manner, and for "wrongly identifying himself" to a guard.
Navalny insists that he was placed in solitary confinement for political reasons, namely because he established a labor union in the penal colony.
Navalny was arrested in January last year upon his return to Moscow from Germany, where he was treated for a poison attack in Siberia in 2020 with what European labs defined as a Soviet-style nerve agent.
Navalny has blamed President Vladimir Putin for the poison attack, which the Kremlin has denied.
The corruption crusader was then handed a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for violating the terms of an earlier parole during of his convalescence abroad. The original conviction is widely regarded as a trumped-up, politically motivated case.
In March, Navalny was sentenced in a separate case to nine years in prison on embezzlement and contempt charges that he and his supporters have repeatedly rejected as politically motivated.