Europe

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny located in Arctic prison colony

Putin’s most prominent political opponent disappeared from a prison near Moscow on December 6th

Worries about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny spread after prison officials said he was no longer on the inmate roster. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

Mon Dec 25 2023 - 14:58

The jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been located in a remote prison colony above the Arctic Circle after going missing for nearly three weeks, his aides said on Monday.

Mr Navalny was tracked down to the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region, about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow, said his spokewoman Kira Yarmysh. “We have found Alexei Navalny,” she wrote on Twitter/X.

Mr Navalny, who has been sentenced to nearly three decades in jail after building a nationwide political opposition to Putin, disappeared from a prison in the Vladimir region near Moscow on December 6th, raising fears among his supporters about his health. A UN official described it as a “forced disappearance”.

Ms Yarmysh said Mr Navalny’s lawyer managed to see him on Monday and added: “He is doing well.”

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Mr Navalny’s aides had been preparing for his expected transfer to a “special regime” colony, the harshest grade in Russia’s prison system.

Russian prison transfers are notorious for taking a long time, sometimes weeks, during which there is no access to prisoners, with information about their whereabouts limited or non-existent.

The gas-rich Yamal-Nenets autonomous region in northwestern Siberia is one of Russia’s most remote places. The Kharp high-security prison colony holding Mr Navalny was first established under Stalin in the Soviet Union as part of the Gulag network.

“The conditions there are harsh, with a special regime in the permafrost zone. It is very difficult to get there,” said Ivan Zhdanov, another Navalny associate.

Mr Zhdanov said that Mr Navalny’s communication with the outside world will be severely restricted by the new location. “Many thanks to our supporters, activists, journalists and the media who are concerned about Alexei’s fate and who do not get tired of writing about the situation,” he added.

Mr Navalny’s allies previously linked the timing of his disappearance to President Vladimir Putin’s announcement to seek re-election in Russia’s 2024 presidential race.

“It was clear from the beginning that the authorities wanted to isolate Alexei, especially before the elections,” said Mr Zhdanov on Monday.

Mr Putin is the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Stalin and could surpass him if he continues to run for a sixth term in power.

Mr Navalny’s supporters have launched an anti-Putin campaign including billboards in Moscow, St Petersburg and Novosibirsk, with a QR-code linking to a website that calls for Putin critics to use non-violent “partisan” tactics to express their dissent.

Mr Navalny, the anti-corruption activist who became a leading opponent of Mr Putin, was poisoned in Russia with novichok in 2020, evacuated to Germany for treatment, and then returned to Russia in 2021, where he was arrested, convicted on fraud and extremism charges and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

His supporters say he has suffered from mysterious stomach ailments in jail and believe that he is likely to be kept incarcerated for as long as Mr Putin remains in power.

The Russian authorities have previously detained three lawyers representing Mr Navalny in what his allies said was an attempt to “completely isolate” him. — Guardian

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