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Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was located in a penal colony in Russia’s far north, his team said Monday, after a span of nearly three weeks when the imprisoned dissident politician’s whereabouts were not known to his aides, lawyers and family.
“His lawyer visited him today. Alexey is doing well,” Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Yarmysh added that he is being kept in a prison in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenetsk region more than 1,000 miles northeast of Moscow, a region notorious for severe winters and the site of some of the harshest camps of the Soviet gulag system.
“It is almost impossible to get to this colony; it is almost impossible to even send letters there,” Navalny’s ally Leonid Volkov said. “This is the highest possible level of isolation from the world — which is the whole purpose of this endeavor.”
Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been tracked down to a penal colony north of the Arctic Circle. He had been missing for three weeks. (Video: Reuters)
Navalny’s team had had no contact with the politician since early December. He was supposed to appear at several court hearings, but they were delayed, with authorities first citing technical difficulties organizing a video link for Navalny. Eventually, his aides were told that Navalny had been transferred from the colony in the Vladimir region, which is just over 100 miles east of Moscow.
Navalny, a prominent Kremlin critic who mounted the most significant political challenge to President Vladimir Putin in the past decade, was arrested in early 2021 immediately upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he was being treated following a nerve agent poisoning. He has been held behind bars ever since, with authorities launching a slew of criminal cases against him, all of which Navalny has rejected as politically motivated. According to Yarmysh, Navalny is a defendant in 14 criminal cases and faces up to 35 years in prison in total.
In August, a Russian court handed him a 19-year sentence on charges of “extremism” for organizing a political movement opposing the Kremlin and ordered for him to be transferred to a “special regime” colony. Such facilities are notorious for their severe conditions and harsh treatment of prisoners.
Transfers within Russia’s penal system are secretive and potentially dangerous for inmates, who disappear for weeks on end without oversight from lawyers or family members.
Navalny’s team said it had to send over 600 requests to various detention centers to find any information about the politician’s whereabouts. His transfer and disappearance came as Putin launched his campaign for a fifth presidential term with elections approximately four months away.
“From the very beginning, it was clear that the authorities wanted to isolate Alexei, especially before the elections,” Ivan Zhdanov, the head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption foundation which investigated numerous Russian officials, said in a statement. “His location was kept secret and they put a complete ban on releasing any information about him.”
“Alexei’s situation is a clear example of how the system treats political prisoners, trying to isolate and suppress them,” Zhdanov added.
The opposition politician’s team recently launched a campaign to persuade Russians to vote for anyone but Putin in the upcoming elections as means of resistance against his rule and the war in Ukraine.