Poisoned. Tortured. Incarcerated. Why nothing can break Putin’s political prisoner number one

Alexei Navalny’s latest trial began on 19 June at the maximum-security Penal Colony 6, some 150 miles east of Moscow. Already serving a nine-year sentence for various trumped-up offences, Vladimir Putin’s last heavyweight political opponent was facing a further 30 years for allegedly inciting and financing extremism and ‘rehabilitating Nazi ideology’ – an apparent reference to his support for Ukraine.

The proceedings were briefly transmitted via a scarcely audible video feed to a separate room for journalists. Navalny, in a black prison uniform, rebuked the judge for his ‘seriously limited’ independence and for failing to let his parents into the courtroom. He said he had been given 3,828 pages of documents detailing the offences he had purportedly committed while isolated in prison, but protested: ‘Although it’s clear from the size of the tomes that I am a sophisticated and persistent criminal, it’s impossible to find out exactly what I’m accused of.’ He complained that ‘in the past, whenever I said the word “Putin”, they simply turned off the microphone and stopped the video feed’.

As if on cue, the judge ruled that the rest of the trial would be held behind closed doors.

Kira Yarmysh, 33, Navalny’s spokeswoman and one of his closest aides throughout the tumultuous past decade, viewed the images in a secret sanctuary somewhere in Europe. In a Zoom interview two days later, she told me that it was upsetting to see how thin her boss had become, but reassuring to see he had not lost his fearlessness, defiance or sense of humour.

So Putin’s scourge, Russia’s most celebrated political prisoner, a man Putin refuses to refer to by name, had not been broken by 30 months of extreme physical and psychological deprivation while incarcerated, I asked. ‘Definitely no,’ she replied. ‘He’s probably the most optimistic man in the whole of Russia at the moment.’

Yarmysh’s fighting spirit likewise remains firmly intact, though she too has paid a heavy price for supporting Navalny.

She was sitting next to him when he famously succumbed to poisoning on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow in 2020. She also accompanied him when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany, together with his wife Yulia, only to witness him being arrested on arrival. Yarmysh has herself been locked up four times, endured prolonged house arrest and now lives in indefinite exile from her homeland.

This personable and articulate young woman nonetheless remains utterly convinced that Navalny will one day lead a new, free and prosperous Russia.

‘I would not do what I’m doing if I didn’t have this faith,’ she said. ‘I honestly believe that historical justice is on our side. Putin will fall sooner or later and I can’t see anyone else more fit or capable to be president than Alexei.’

As she spoke – with Navalny incarcerated, the Ukraine war distracting the West’s attention and Moscow ruthlessly crushing all dissent – that seemed hopelessly optimistic. But then, two days after our interview, Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the mercenary Wagner group, led a dramatic and apparently mutinous advance on Moscow before striking a mysterious deal with the alarmed Russian President. The extraordinary episode exposed Putin’s fragility, and Yarmysh’s optimism suddenly felt a fraction less far-fetched.

Yarmysh was raised in a middle-class family in the very city Prigozhin seized, Rostov-on-Don. Fiercely intelligent, she earned a place to study journalism at the elite Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) by dint of winning a national televised quiz competition.

After graduating, she worked in public relations for the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, then for a Russian airline. She could have prospered in Putin’s corrupt Russia, she says. While under house arrest in 2021, she watched one of her former MGIMO classmates compere Putin’s annual televised call-in show with the Russian public. ‘It could have been me,’ she laughs.

But the rigged parliamentary elections of December 2011 set her on a different path.

‘I was very infuriated that [for] once in my life I tried to be a decent citizen and participate in elections and it was in vain,’ she tells me in near-perfect English. She joined a mass protest and found it a joyful, liberating experience. ‘I was happy that I could turn my anger into something. At least I could protest and be visible.’

She attended more protests. In 2013 she volunteered to help in Navalny’s campaign to become Moscow’s mayor (he came second, with 27 per cent of the vote, and was never allowed to contest another election). The following year she applied to become his press secretary. He was under house arrest at the time, so she was given the job after being interviewed by his staff.

Several months passed before she actually met her tall, charming boss with his glamorous wife Yulia and children, Daria and Zakhar, at one of his many trials. She was impressed.

‘He was charismatic and radiated energy,’ she remembers. She soon became a key player in his campaign to expose the corruption of Putin’s cronies and build a national political organisation through astute use of social media.

Her first five-day spell in a Moscow detention centre came in February 2018, after she used a YouTube broadcast to publicise a rally supporting a boycott of that year’s presidential election, from which Navalny had been banned. She was in a cell by herself, and passed the time by reading books. It was ‘boring’, she says, adding that detainees are treated far more harshly in 2023. ‘Now, everything is different.’

Three months later she was detained again for organising anti-Putin rallies prior to his fourth inauguration. She was locked up for 25 days with several other women. With Navalny’s encouragement, she turned the experience into a novel, The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3, published in Britain last month.

In August 2020 she accompanied Navalny to Siberia for a corruption investigation. They expected to be harassed, but their visit to Tomsk was ‘completely calm, very peaceful…it was the best trip ever’.

She sat next to Navalny on the flight back to Moscow. Shortly after taking off, he began to feel unwell. He turned very pale and asked her to talk to him, to distract him, then went to the toilet. Yarmysh suspected nothing untoward, even when the pilot asked if there was a doctor on board. Then another Navalny aide rushed back to say he was unconscious on the floor of the flight attendants’ kitchenette and had obviously been poisoned.

The pilot made an emergency landing in Omsk. Navalny was rushed to hospital. Yarmysh had to explain to the doctors who he was and that he had been poisoned. She alerted his wife and broke the news of his poisoning on Twitter. ‘It was very, very scary that he wouldn’t make it, but we were not thinking about it… I was just focusing on my duties,’ she says.

Two days later, Navalny was flown to Germany where he was found to have been poisoned with Novichok, the Putin regime’s signature nerve agent. He spent almost three weeks in a coma. While he recuperated in the Black Forest, the Bellingcat investigative journalism outfit tracked down the assassination team. Navalny famously called one of them, pretending to be a security official, and duped him into confessing that they had put the Novichok in his underpants. The absurdity of Putin’s henchmen is brilliantly captured in the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny, released last year, as is the drama of his return to Moscow.

Yarmysh says there was never any doubt he would go home, despite the dangers. ‘It was never a matter for discussion. Everyone realised he would never stay anywhere but Russia.’ But his team did not believe the regime would be stupid enough to arrest him at the airport, in full view of the media hordes. Or to do so for allegedly violating his parole conditions by leaving the country. As Yarmysh says: ‘He didn’t wilfully leave Russia. He was taken out unconscious and evacuated.’

That was the last time she saw Navalny. He was dispatched to Penal Colony Number 2, but not before he had delivered another devastating blow to Putin’s credibility. Two days after his arrest, his organisation, FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation), released a documentary exposing in vivid detail the £1 billion pleasure palace that Putin had secretly built for himself on the Black Sea coast.

Yarmysh was detained two days later for tweeting details of a demonstration against Putin’s corruption. This time she was held for nine days, during which the regime charged her with violating Covid regulations by encouraging the rally. ‘It was a huge hypocrisy because everything in Moscow was working. All the concert halls, the restaurants and museums were open,’ she says.

She spent the next seven months under house arrest while awaiting trial. She was alone in a strange flat, her landlady having ejected her from her own apartment following her arrest – ‘I was too dangerous’. She was allowed no visitors save her lawyer, and no phone calls, internet or mail. She wore an electronic tag. She had to persuade a policeman to remove her rubbish. After two months she was allowed to leave the flat for an hour a day, provided she ventured no more than 500 metres away.

That April, despite having been under house arrest and lacking any internet access, she spent her fourth spell in a detention centre after colleagues used her Twitter account to promote another protest rally. Perversely, those 10 days proved a relatively pleasant interlude: she had company, and was allowed to make a daily 15-minute phone call.

Four months after that, Yarmysh was convicted of violating Covid rules and sentenced to 18 months of ‘restricted freedom’, during which she would be confined to her flat from 8pm to 8am. In the hiatus before her sentence was enforced, she fled Russia.

It was an easy decision, she says. By then Navalny’s FBK and political party had been designated ‘extremist’ organisations and forcibly disbanded. Yarmysh reckons a dozen of his closest colleagues had been arrested, and 10 times as many forced into exile. Abroad, at least, she and they could continue to work full-time for Navalny, exposing Putin’s corruption and denouncing his war in Ukraine.

She will not say where she now lives. Her secrecy is not because she fears for her life – it is to deny Putin a propaganda weapon. ‘Of course the Russian secret services know where I am, but if you announce your place they will try to make a whole point about you living in a Nato state or something.’

Meanwhile, she has been placed on Russia’s ‘wanted’ list for evading her sentence, meaning she would be arrested immediately if she tried to return home. She has also been charged with publishing false information about the Ukraine war on YouTube – an offence punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Her novel remains on sale in Russia, but because she has also been deemed a ‘foreign agent’, bookshops can only display it with an opaque black cover concealing its title. The authorities reportedly tried to find evidence that it promoted LGBT subjects and drug use, she says, but ‘nothing happened so I guess that check was useless’.

Yarmysh’s plight is nothing compared to Navalny’s, of course. She communicates with him by old-fashioned letter, receives updates from his lawyers, and paints a grim picture of a prison regime that is clearly designed to break his spirit, if not to kill him.

Early on, he could mix with other inmates at Penal Colony 6, to which he was moved in June 2022, and even formed a prisoners’ union that fought for better conditions, including the right to have chairs, rather than stools, while working. The authorities are said to have given him an unwashed homeless man and a ‘psycho’ who screamed for 17 hours a day as cellmates.

For the past year, however, he has been held in solitary confinement or, worse, a punishment cell. His alleged offences, Yarmysh says, include walking without his hands behind his back, buttoning his uniform up incorrectly, washing his face at the wrong time, addressing his guards disrespectfully and declaring his innocence when asked his name and offence.

Earlier this year she tweeted that she did ‘not rule out’ that he was being slowly poisoned, on account of crippling stomach pain he was experiencing. In April it was reported that he had lost 8kg in weight in just over two weeks and an ambulance was called. But the Kremlin would only say his health was a matter for the federal prison service.

Navalny’s punishment cell is tiny, scarcely six square metres. It has one small, closed window facing an inner courtyard and no ventilation. His bunk is fastened to the wall from 5am to 10pm. He is not allowed to lie on the floor. The only furniture is a stool. There is no hot water. The lights are never turned off. He is forced to listen to incessant Russian state radio and interminable Putin speeches. ‘It’s another torture because he can’t turn it off,’ says Yarmysh.

He is allowed no personal belongings except a mug, toothbrush and solitary book (he has been reading various US presidential memoirs). He is allowed no visitors save his lawyers, and all his communications with them are monitored. His parents were last permitted to visit him 14 months ago, his wife 17 months ago (his family have just launched a lawsuit against the penal colony for refusing them visiting rights). Not even his guards can talk to him, and they have cameras on them to ensure they don’t. He can write and receive letters, but they are censored and he is only given a pen and paper for 30 minutes a day.

He is allowed one hour’s exercise at 7am each day, and as mandatory labour, he sews in a room near his cell, equipped with a solitary sewing machine. Exactly what he sews is ‘a huge mystery’, says Yarmysh. ‘No one knows. Even he doesn’t know. It’s some sort of stripes.’

Unlike his fellow inmates, Navalny cannot receive food parcels or buy food from the prison store. He has to survive on whatever the prison provides. ‘Alexei is being tortured by hunger because what he’s provided with is insufficient,’ says Yarmysh. He has lost a lot of weight, suffers from severe back pain and deteriorating eyesight, and is suing the prison for the right to see a dentist.

Technically Navalny can be held in the punishment cell for a maximum of 15 days, but the authorities circumvent that by releasing him and putting him back in the following day. Solitary confinement is an improvement only because the cell is a little bigger, and he is allowed two books instead of one.

Yarmysh insists that Navalny has no regrets about returning to Russia and that after more than two decades of harassment by the regime in Moscow, his spirit is indomitable. ‘I know him. Nothing can break him. He has survived so much and sacrificed so much that I can’t see how any torture they come up with can break him,’ she says. ‘He honestly believes in what he’s doing. He wants Russia to be free and his children to grow up in a peaceful, prosperous country.’

He has the wholehearted backing of his family. ‘I’m dreaming of the day when you will be free and our country will be free. Stay strong, my love,’ Yulia declared when she and Daria, 22, a student at Stanford University, accepted the Oscar for Navalny in Hollywood in March.

Today the family come and go from Moscow, risking arrest. ‘It’s very difficult for them, but they’re very strong people and believe in what he’s doing,’ says Yarmysh. ‘Alexei told me many times it would be impossible to do what he’s doing if his family didn’t support him.’

While Navalny has lost his political organisation inside Russia, and can communicate with the outside world only through smuggled messages, he still believes he is advancing his cause through his imprisonment. He serves as a symbol of defiance, says Yarmysh. ‘He’s setting an example of a person who’s not afraid [of Putin], and right now a lot of Russians need such an example.’

But she does fear for his physical health and ability to survive endless imprisonment.

‘I think Putin is trying to make him suffer as much as he can – physically, psychologically, by any means,’ she says. ‘I think he would like to see Alexei killed. Maybe he’s not given the direct order yet, but that might change any minute and right now he’s just being tortured and that torture is destroying his health so badly it might cause his death.’

The Ukraine war has further complicated Navalny’s position by distracting the West’s attention from his plight, and reducing its leverage over a dictator who no longer cares what it thinks of him. ‘Public interest is the only thing that helps Alexei to stay relatively secure,’ she says. ‘Without this public attention, everyone will forget about him and Putin will kill him.’

Sergey Smirnov, editor-in-chief of Media-zona, an independent Russian media outlet, agrees. ‘It has become easier for Putin to deal with dissidents. He no longer has to answer questions from the West,’ he told me in an email, adding that the war had led to ‘a sharp increase in the number of political prisoners and harsher terms for them. Navalny’s position has worsened because he openly opposes the war and Putin.’

But here’s the paradox. The war could also, just conceivably, prove Navalny’s salvation. Yarmysh believes that Putin launched it to distract Russians from acute domestic problems, thinking he would win it in days and could use it as a pretext for crushing all dissidents. But 17 months on, she believes, the opposition to his rule is silently swelling, along with the death toll.

‘He has definitely miscalculated, and I’m sure that this war will be the end of Putin,’ she says. ‘He definitely will fall. He’s not eternal. Something will definitely happen to him. He’s not only an old man [now he’s 70] – he’s obsolete in terms of his mindset. Someone who’s so out of date will eventually go away and something new and bright will come instead.’

Wishful thinking? Probably. Smirnov agrees that if Putin loses power, ‘the political prisoners have a good chance of being released’, but adds: ‘The necessary condition is a change in the political regime. So far, the likelihood of this looks small, even if Putin is defeated in the war with Ukraine.’

But then Prigozhin’s rebellion caught everyone by surprise, and seems to have ushered in a period of unusual uncertainty, of flux. If Navalny can stay alive, who knows what might happen?

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