News of the Day: 7 June 2021

The Moscow Times: Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been transferred from a prison hospital back to his penal colony after receiving treatment following a hunger strike, his allies said Monday. Navalny was jailed for two and a half years in February on old embezzlement charges he and his supporters say are politically motivated.  He was sentenced shortly after returning to Russia from Germany, where he was receiving treatment for a near-fatal poisoning attack with a nerve agent.

RFE/RL: A Moscow court has prolonged the curfew for Lyubov Sobol, the lawyer for jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), potentially undermining her campaign for parliament. Sobol’s lawyer, Vladimir Voronin, told the Interfax news agency on June 7 that the court extended her curfew by six months to the end of December. The 33-year-old lawyer said in March she planned to run for parliament’s lower chamber, the State Duma, in September elections. She is the latest opposition politician seeking a seat in parliament to face legal pressure.

RFE/RL: Russian opposition politician and former State Duma Deputy Dmitry Gudkov says that he decided to leave Russia after he was warned that his relatives and associates could face arrest if he remained. In an interview with Current Time from Kyiv on June 7, Gudkov said he had been given “a window of opportunity” to leave Russia before being arrested. He said he had been told “the Gudkov matter will be settled by any means necessary.” “Permission has been given from the very top,” he said his sources informed him.

RFE/RL: David Dushman, the last surviving Soviet soldier involved in the liberation of Auschwitz, has died, the AP reported. He was 98. Dushman flattened the fence around the Nazi death camp located in southern Poland with his tank on January 27, 1945 as Soviet forces moved westward toward Berlin. The Nazis deported at least 1.3 million people to the Auschwitz complex between 1940 and 1945, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. About 1.1 million were murdered by the camp authorities.

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