Longer prison term will protect me from nuclear war, says Putin critic

‘What if Putin secretly admires me? Who is going to bomb a prison colony in a swamp?’

RUSSIA’S jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny yesterday joked that Vladimir Putin was shielding him from a possible nuclear war by announcing fresh charges that could keep him in a remote prison for another decade.

Just a week after an appeals court upheld his conviction in a closed-doors trial, Mr Navalny said he was facing new charges as he tried to make light of the Kremlin’s latest move to keep him behind bars for good.

“What if Putin secretly admires me? Maybe that’s why he wants to put me in an underground bunker, guarded by reliable people like him,” Mr Navalny wrote on social media, referencing reports of the Russian leader’s increasingly isolated and paranoid lifestyle.

Mr Navalny, who survived a nearlethal poisoning in 2020 and was jailed last year for breaking the terms of his suspended sentence while in a coma, said he now faced charges of founding an “extremist group” to “sow hatred against officials and oligarchs”.

The charges could see him sentenced to a further 15 years in prison. But he joked it could save him from an impending nuclear war. “who is going to bomb a prison colony in a swamp?” he said.

It also emerged yesterday that Mr Putin had lost a high-profile adviser over the Ukraine war. Valentin Yumashev, son-in-law of Boris Yeltsin – Russia’s first post-soviet president – quit his job shortly after the start of the invasion.

Mr Yumashev, 64, a former Kremlin chief of staff, helped Mr Putin to become Yeltsin’s successor. It was not confirmed why he left, though his daughter has expressed anti-war comments on Instagram.