Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has said officials at the Arctic penal colony where he is serving a 19-year sentence have isolated him in a tiny punishment cell over a minor infraction.

He said in a social media statement relayed from behind bars that prison officials accused him of refusing to “introduce himself in line with protocol” and ordered him to serve seven days in a punishment cell.

”The thought that Putin will be satisfied with sticking me into a barracks in the far north and will stop torturing me in the punishment confinement was not only cowardly, but naive as well,” he said.

It appear to be the latest step designed to ramp up pressure on President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest political opponent.

Russia Putin
Vladimir Putin (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo/AP)

Mr Navalny, 47, is jailed on charges of extremism, and had been imprisoned in the Vladimir region of central Russia, about 140 miles east of Moscow, before being transferred last month to a “special regime” penal colony — the highest security level of prisons in Russia — above the Artic Circle.

His allies condemned the transfer to a colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,200 miles north east of Moscow, as another attempt to force him into silence.

The remote region is notorious for long and severe winters. Kharp is about 60 miles from Vorkuta, whose coal mines were part of the Soviet gulag prison-camp system.

“It is almost impossible to get to this colony; it is almost impossible to even send letters there. This is the highest possible level of isolation from the world,” Mr Navalny’s chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, said.

Mr Navalny has been behind bars since January 2021 when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Before his arrest, he campaigned against official corruption and organised major anti-Kremlin protests.

He has since received three prison terms but rejects all the charges against him as politically motivated.

Until last month, Mr Navalny was serving time at Penal Colony No 6 in the Vladimir region, and officials there regularly placed him in a punishment cell for alleged minor infractions. He spent months in isolation.

At the prison colony in Kharp, being in a punishment cell means that walking outside in a narrow concrete prison yard is only allowed at 6.30am, he said on Tuesday.

Inmates in regular conditions are allowed to walk “after lunch, and even though it is the polar night right now, still after lunch it is warmer by several degrees”, he said, adding that the temperature has been as low as minus 32C.

“Few things are as refreshing as a walk in Yamal at 6.30 in the morning,” he wrote, using the shorthand for the name of the region.