From Russia with love..

[Admin]

Russian authorities have classified the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny a “terrorist” and “extremist”, according to a new social media post from the Kremlin foe. The opposition politician said he had been summoned to appear before a commission, which voted unanimously to change his status – and place a board above his prison bed calling him a “terrorist”. But Mr Navalny, who was arrested and imprisoned on returning to Russia in January, claimed the new label may turn out less onerous than a previous “flight risk” designation. That was accompanied by much more intrusive monitoring, he suggested. “I counted that I said ‘Navalny, Alexei, born 1976, illegally imprisoned in colony 2, section 2, reporting, 1669 times’,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “That’s what I had to do every two hours to prove that I hadn’t run away. And it got terribly annoying.”

Mr Navalny was designated a flight risk even before being transferred to the notorious Pokrov prison colony 100km (62 miles) east of Moscow. That designation opened the door to a draining monitoring regime which he said amounted to torture. Extremism, in comparison, was “bliss”, he wrote. “I was worried they would demand I kiss Putin portraits and learn Medvedev’s speeches by rote, but it turns out that isn’t necessary," he wrote. "The only difference is that I now have a board above my bed.” Mr Navalny, 45, has been Vladimir Putin’s most prominent political opponent and survived a nerve agent attack in August 2020. A compelling body of evidence connects that apparent assassination attempt with Russian authorities. The Kremlin rejects the accusation. The opposition politician was imprisoned following a series of dubious trials, widely viewed as politically motivated and contravening legal norms, with the first of them even held in a police station.

Anti-Putin campaigner Navalny designated a ‘terrorist’ | The Independent