Alexei Navalny, 47, is serving sentences totalling greater than 30 years on a spread of prices.

Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny cracked jokes on Wednesday in his first court docket look since being transferred to an Arctic penal colony, however a choose rejected his newest problem towards his therapy in jail.

Navalny appeared by video hyperlink from the “Penal Wolf” colony to which he was transferred final month from a jail in Melekhovo, east of Moscow, in an arduous three-week journey by highway and rail.

He drew laughter from the choose when he requested on the decision whether or not the Melekhovo colony had thrown a celebration to have fun his departure, and whether or not it had included karaoke.

He later inquired if the jail division in Melekhovo had staged a unadorned social gathering – a reference to a gathering of scantily clad celebrities in Moscow final month that triggered a nationwide scandal.

The exchanges confirmed Navalny’s potential to seek out humour even in his grim state of affairs and to attach with the surface world regardless of being despatched to one among Russia’s most distant and inhospitable areas.

His frequent court docket hearings have offered him with a platform to maintain up his assaults on President Vladimir Putin and the struggle in Ukraine and to problem and mock his incarcerators. He instructed choose Kirill Nikiforov, who has presided over many such classes, that “a tear is flowing down my cheek” from the pleasure of seeing him once more.

Navalny, 47, is serving sentences totalling greater than 30 years on a spread of prices, from fraud to extremist exercise, that he says have been trumped as much as silence him. In 2020 he survived an try to poison him with a nerve agent.

The Kremlin says he’s a convicted legal and his therapy is a matter for the jail service. It has portrayed him and his supporters as extremists with hyperlinks to the CIA intelligence company who they are saying are in search of to destabilise Russia.

‘LONG WAY AWAY’

At Wednesday’s listening to – a transcript of which was compiled by unbiased Russian information outlet Mediazona – Navalny unsuccessfully argued that authorities had acted illegally by sending him to an isolation cell in October for insulting a jail inspector.

Navalny mentioned the inspector had confiscated his pen regardless of the actual fact he was entitled to have writing supplies, and acknowledged he “went overboard” by calling the official a satan, a moron and a scarecrow.

However by the point of that incident, he argued, he ought to have already been moved from Melekhovo to a different detention facility after his newest 19-year sentence was handed down in August.

The choose rejected Navalny’s grievance.

The Polar Wolf colony, some 1,900 km (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow, is one among Russia’s harshest. Navalny joked in a social media publish relayed via his attorneys this week that the temperature had “not been colder than -32 diploma celsius but” and he was discovering his early morning train “invigorating”.

In Wednesday’s listening to, he mentioned the meals was wonderful however he had but to obtain any letters or telegrams.

“I am fairly a good distance away,” he mentioned.

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