Veteran Russian activist and political prisoner Mikhail Krieger declares hunger strike after being kept in isolation unit “for his safety”

Russian activist and political prisoner Mikhail Krieger has declared a hunger strike after prison officials refused to release him from a punishment cell once his sentence there ended. The officials cited alleged threats to Krieger from other inmates as the reason he was being kept in solitary confinement. Krieger has denied facing any threats or mistreatment from fellow prisoners and insists the administration is isolating him in order to cut him off from others. He is demanding to be returned to the general barracks.

As Katya Krieger, the political prisoner’s daughter, wrote on Facebook:

“After finishing his third term in the punishment cell, they sent him to solitary confinement for 90 days under the pretext that he is ‘in danger.’ But he told his lawyer that no threats from fellow inmates exist — they just want to isolate him because of his views, so he doesn’t communicate with others. My father never complained about his neighbors. In reality, solitary is the same cell as the punishment unit, only with the bed unfastened, which reduces the space to walk. Apparently he lay down on the unfastened bed and was punished again with another term in the isolation cell. That ‘punishment’ ends Oct. 9. My father has declared a hunger strike until then. If they return him to the barracks, he will start eating. But it makes no sense that someone allegedly threatened with violence would go on hunger strike just to be put back with his tormentors…”

According to Katya’s posts, Mikhail Krieger had previously been sent to the punishment cell twice: in early September, on the very day he was scheduled to meet his daughter, and in early August. He has also regularly complained that, while he receives letters, the colony’s administration does not mail out his replies.

Krieger is a Moscow-based opposition activist and a former deputy of Moscow's Tagansky District Council. In 1991, during the August Coup, he and his wife Vera took part in the defense of Moscow's White House, where Boris Yeltsin famously climbed up on a tank in opposition to the KGB hardliners who had imprisoned Mikhail Gorbachev. Two decades later, Krieger organized rallies against Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, starting from Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.

In 2023 Krieger was sentenced to seven years in prison for “justifying terrorism” over two Facebook posts he had written in 2020. He is currently serving his sentence in Correctional Colony No. 5 (IK-5) in Russia’s Orel Region.

During his last statement in court, Krieger spoke out in defense of the late Alexei Navalny and of Russian opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza – at the time, both men were serving prison terms for political reasons. Navalny was murdered in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024. Six months later, Kara-Murza was released as part of the largest prisoner swap between Moscow and the West since the end of the Cold War.