Associates of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said today that his whereabouts are unknown after the prison administration announced that he is no longer in the penal colony where he was serving his sentence.
The former lawyer and fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin was sentenced in August to an additional 19 years in prison, on top of the eleven and a half years he had already served.
His co-workers say they haven’t seen him since December 6.
Lawyer Vyacheslav Gimadi said prison officials told the court today that Navalny had left IK-6 prison in Melehovo, 235 km east of Moscow. They did not say where he was taken.
“We don’t know where he is,” Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmys said.
In 2021, Navalny voluntarily returned to Russia from Germany, where he was being treated for nerve agent poisoning. His supporters compare him to the late South African leader Nelson Mandela, and Russian authorities see him as a CIA-linked extremist who wants to destabilize Russia, Hina writes.
“Navalny, who is serving a 19-year prison sentence for extremism, was supposed to appear in court today via video link, but he did not appear,” said his spokeswoman Kira Yarmys.
She added that prison officials said they had problems with electricity.
Lawyers have also been unable to access Navalny in recent days, the spokeswoman said.
“It’s already the sixth day in a row that we don’t know where Aleksei is and what’s happening to him,” Yarmys wrote on the X platform.
Navalny (47) has been behind bars since January 2021. As a staunch opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, he campaigned against corruption and organized large-scale anti-Kremlin protests. His arrest followed his return to Moscow from Germany, where he recovered from nerve agent poisoning, which he blamed on the Kremlin.
Navalny has since received three prison sentences and spent months in solitary confinement in a penal colony in Vladimir Oblast, east of Moscow, for alleged minor offenses. He dismissed all the charges against him as politically motivated.
Last Sunday, Yarmys said that Navalny’s lawyers spent many hours in the penal colony three days in a row waiting for permission to visit him, but were denied at the last moment. Letters to Navalny are not allowed, and he did not appear at scheduled court hearings via video link.
She said on Friday that the development of events is worrying considering that Navalny recently fell ill.
“He felt dizzy and was lying on the floor. We don’t know what caused it, but given that he was deprived of food, kept in a cell with no ventilation and given minimal time outdoors, it looked like he passed out from starvation “, said the spokeswoman.
She added that lawyers visited him afterwards and that he seemed “more or less fine”.
Navalny should be transferred to a penal colony with special security, an institution with the highest level of security in the Russian prison system.
Russian prison transfers are notorious for taking a long time, sometimes for weeks, during which there is no access to prisoners and information about them is limited or unavailable.
