"Supporters raised the money in less than an hour. Paying the fine, however, was complicated by the matter of Kagarlitsky's having already been designated as both a "foreign agent" and a "terrorist or extremist" (common terms leveled against anti-war advocates remaining in Russia) and was therefore prohibited by law from conducting financial transactions. The state then appealed his December release because the fine had not been paid. Eight weeks later, the military court reversed the December verdict and imposed the harsher prison sentence of five years."
"Kagarlitsky is now serving his sentence at Penal Colony No. 4 in Torzhok, 155 kilometers from Moscow. On November 8, he was sent to solitary confinement for three days; no reasons have been given. On November 20, lawyer Yulia Kuznetsova appealed to the head of the penal colony with a request to hospitalize Kagarlitsky: according to Kuznetsova, the 66-year-old prisoner's health had deteriorated."
"Kagarlitsky is one of Russia's best-known political prisoners. There are others, much less visible, including quite a few labor rights advocates, environmentalists, ethnic and racial minority defenders about whom nobody writes or speaks. According to the UN Human Rights Committee in Russia, there are still more than 2,000 political prisoners incarcerated in Russia, at least 120 of them "in imminent danger due to their critical health, age or disability.""
Boris Kagarlitsky was arrested in July 2023 over a since-deleted YouTube video about the 2022 Crimea Bridge explosion. He is a prominent Russian leftist intellectual and Marxist critic of Western imperialism and Putin's domestic authoritarianism. After nearly five months in pretrial detention 1,000 kilometers from Moscow, he was convicted and initially released with a 609,000-ruble fine. Supporters raised the money quickly, but his prior designation as a "foreign agent" and a "terrorist or extremist" legally barred him from financial transactions. The state appealed, and a military court later imposed a five-year prison sentence. He is serving at Penal Colony No. 4 in Torzhok, has faced solitary confinement, and his lawyer has requested hospitalization due to deteriorating health. The UN reports over 2,000 political prisoners in Russia, including many in critical condition.
Read at The Nation
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