EWNC, 12.12.2015
UPD Today Evgeny Vitishko had to stop his hunger strike due to abrupt deterioration of his condition. (http://ewnc.org/node/20283)

Environmentalist Evgeny Vitishko, who is in prison since February 2014 and was set to be freed last month, is still in prison, and his health is deteriorating due to a hunger strike he declared to protest the sudden reversal of decision to set him free.
Vitishko started his hunger strike on November 23. Currently authorities in his penal colony in Tambov region still send him to work full time picking cabbage from frozen ground and loading and unloading cargo trucks. Vitishko usually works from early morning until 4 p.m, six days a week. In a recent telephone conversation with friends, he has complained of low blood pressure, lightheadedness, and kidney pain.
Vitishko was set to be released on November 21, after a judge ruled to soften his punishment to allow him to go home, in a decision on November 10 which prosecutors and the colony administration fully supported. However, with just several hours to go before he was to leave the colony, prosecutors issued a protest against his release on November 20. Prosecutors further acted to delay a parole hearing that was scheduled for Vitishko on December 3rd. At the hearing, prosecutor Ilya Korshunov argued that the parole hearing must be held in the presence of the “aggrieved party” in Vitishko’s case.
Evgeny was imprisoned after he was found guilty of writing slogans on a fence illegally installed in a public forest around the dacha of ex-governor of Krasnodar region, currently Russia’s agriculture minister. Several slogans painted on corrugated metal fence, which could have been washed off with a simple detergent, were ruled by the judge to amount to several thousand dollars worth of damage for a firm called Kapitel-2, created as a decoy to divert attention from the governor at the hearing. This firm never expressed any desire to participate in any court hearings however suddenly its absence was served as a pretext to delay the important parole hearing for Evgeny until December 25.
After this pointless hearing was over, the prison guards did not bring him back to his colony from the court, but dragged him, already severely weakened by his hunger strike, to the regional city center Tambov, some 80 kilometers away, just because they had to pick up another inmate in the regional court. The round trip took 14 hours and was probably organized to prevent Evgeny from meeting with his friends and activists from Moscow who came to the hearing and petitioned for an appointment with him.
Vitishko’s case and the absurdity of his continued imprisonment has been brought up by Russia’s top rights activists, the Kremlin’s human rights council and even the Kremlin’s ombudsman, directly to President Vladimir Putin. His release was all but a reality, however it seems that some powerful interests intervened in the most cruel fashion to throw back into jail an activist who has almost fought his way to freedom after spending months in jail for nothing.
Evgeny Vitishko has used the ways available to him to fight for his rights and freedom, by lodging appeals to soften his sentence and grant him an early release, both of these appeals have been lodged months ago and are clearly being stalled in order to keep him in jail for as long as possible. He believes the hunger strike is the only instrument left available for him to fight for his rights, even if it severely undermines his health.

Information by EWNC