The United States of America and some European countries have formed boycott statements against Russia to put pressure on its government for sending system critic Alexej Navalny to a so called labor camp. The verdict of two and a half years came unsurprisingly when he returned to his homeland, he was accused for violation of probation rules because he had left Russia deadsick after having been poisoned (probably by that very government) to get hopitalized in Berlin.

This specific imprisonment, typical for Russia and also some other rather absolutist countries, will definitely do more harm to the political activist Navalny than the ankle cuffs France´s former president Nicolas Sarkozy might have to deal with after he was sentenced for bribery.

To understand more about what is going on you might consider reading Aleksander Solzhenitsyn again, even though his books are very last century, it still seems to have some truth in it. Especially because nobody ever knows when and why Navalny would really get out of that camp; realistic onlookers expect him to stay there for even more than ten years if he shows no sign of being broken.

Find out more about the non-fictional situation of Alexander Navalny by reading Andrew E. Kramer´s and Steven Erlanger´s excellent report in the New York Times.