Jailed Vladimir Putin critic Alexei Navalny has said he has been forced to listen to the same speech made by the Russian president for more than 100 days in a row.
The Russian opposition leader, 47, was told by prison officers that the 1 hour 46 minute-long speech was played outside his cell on a daily basis as it contained “instructions on educational work”.
Marking the 100th day of having been played President Putin‘s speech to the nation from February this year, Mr Navalny tweeted that he was told that he will have to listen to the speech for the entirety of 2023.
“Once Putin makes his next annual address, they’ll start playing it for us instead,” Mr Navalny said.
In the speech, which was delivered to the Federal Assembly in Moscow, President Putin claims that the “special military operation” – which is what Russia calls the war in Ukraine – was conducted to “eliminate the threat posed by the neo-Nazi regime”.
He claimed that Russia did “everything possible” to solve disagreements by “peaceful means,” and blamed the West for readying Ukraine for a “big war” by supplying weapons.
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Mr Navalny is currently serving sentences totalling 11 and half years on charges including fraud.
Last month, he appeared in court faced with new allegations of creating an extremist organisation, for which he could be jailed for up to 30 years, if found guilty.
Since being held in a maximum-security penal colony at Melekhovo, Mr Navalny has made sarcastic demands to Russian prison administrators, which were subsequently denied.
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The outlandish requests included a pet kangaroo, a massage chair, a bottle of moonshine liquor and an award of the highest rank in karate for an inmate who “killed a man with his bare hands”.
Mr Navalny was first arrested in January 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from nerve agent poisoning.
He had fallen ill on a flight to Moscow and was subsequently found to have been poisoned with novichok during a campaign trip to Siberia.
His campaign organisations were labelled as “extremist” in Russia and banned.
