Former prisoners from IK-2, where Navalny will serve his two-and-a-half year sentence, have said the conditions are 'like torture'. 'People did everything not to go there,' Demushkin told Russian television channel TV Rain. Demushkin claimed that the aim of the penal colony is to 'psychologically break people' and leave them isolated from the outside world. The decision to move Navalny to IK-2 caused alarm to human rights activists who monitor the rights of Russian prisoners. Pyotr Kuryanov, a lawyer at the Defence of Prisoners' Rights Foundation NGO, said it is 'lawless' at the penal colony.

Source: Daily Mail February 28, 2021 19:43 UTC