Russian political prisoner given fourth consecutive term in punishment cell despite poor health

A jailed Moscow politician who suffers from both tuberculosis and acute bronchitis has been given a fourth successive two-week term in a punishment cell inside the penal colony where he is serving his sentence, his support group said on Thursday.

Alexey Gorinov, who was jailed for seven years in 2022 for criticising the Russian invasion of Ukraine, informed his lawyers on Wednesday that despite his scrupulous efforts to observe every possible prison rule so as to avoid further punitive measures, his six weeks in a punishment cell had been extended by another 14 days due to his failure to “keep his hands behind his back while outside his cell”.

Gorinov’s support group said that punishing him was already a well-established norm in the penal colony, where the prison authorities have repeatedly extended his confinement to a punishment cell by 14 days.

Gorinov was first placed in a punishment cell, where conditions are far harsher than those in the rest of a prison or penal colony, on 21 July, despite his poor health and the fact that he has had a part of one of his lungs removed.

However, despite the authorities giving him what he has called a “one-way ticket” to Siberia by sending him to a remote penal colony in Russia’s Altai region on the border with Kazakhstan, Gorinov has refused to accept his transfer as “the end”.

“For me, the end is a free democratic European Russia, where human life, rights and freedoms are of supreme value, and where power changes hands on the basis of free, competitive elections … Let’s see who will live to see the end,” he wrote in a letter in June.

Gorinov, who at the time was a local councillor in Moscow, was arrested in March 2022 after calling a children’s drawing competition “inappropriate during wartime”, and for proposing the council observe a minute’s silence for the victims of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He went on to become the first person to be given a custodial sentence under a new law banning the spreading of “false information about the Russian military”.

Following secret recordings of a conversation about a Ukrainian attack on the Crimean Bridge that were made by a prison informant, Gorinov was handed an additional three-year prison sentence for “justifying terrorism” in 2024 and was added to Russia’s list of “terrorists and extremists”.