“His lawyer visited him today. Alexei is doing well,” writes Alexei Navalny’s spokesperson Kira Jarmysh when she announces that he has been found.
Missing since the beginning of December
Alexei Navalny had previously not been heard from or seen since the beginning of December, which had caused his associates to sound the alarm.
When they visited the penal colony in the Vladimir region east of Moscow, they were told only that there was no prisoner named Alexei Navalny there.
Now, about 20 days later, they have received word that Russia’s best-known opposition politician has been moved to another penal colony: in the small town of Charp in the Yamalo-Nentsien region, in the northernmost Ural Mountains of northwestern Siberia.
Condemned again and again
Since Alexei Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021, he has been re-sentenced several times by the regime-loyal judiciary. Most recently for “extremism” – which meant that sooner or later he would be moved again, to some penal colony with the highest level of security.
But no one has said when, or to whom. Russia’s prison system is notorious, among other things, for torture-ridden transports between remote penal colonies that have existed since the Soviet era.
Prisoners “disappear”
It is not unusual for prisoners to “disappear” for several weeks or sometimes months during a transfer. Relatives, and the prisoners themselves, are usually told where they will be placed when they have already arrived.
For many years now, the system has been accused of violating international law by the fact that people disappear in practice under the supervision of the authorities, in what are formally called enforced disappearances. The UN’s special human rights rapporteur for Russia warned last week that this risked falling within that framework.
In recent weeks, there have been various reports about Alexei Navalny that have turned out to be false or deliberately misleading.
“Want to isolate him”
“It was clear early on that the authorities wanted to keep Aleksey isolated, especially before the election,” writes another of the opposition leader’s employees, Ivan Zhdanov, who is a leading figure in Navalny’s political movement FBK, in social media.
He tells how the colleagues have contacted all possible institutions and authorities in search of answers, until they learned that Navalny was in “one of the most northern and remote colonies” – the one in Charp known as the “Tundra Wolf”.
Tough conditions
“The conditions there are tough, with special security management in the permafrost zone. It is very difficult to get there,” writes Ivan Zjdanov, who adds that the possibilities to communicate with e-mail, for example, are limited.
The Kremlin has scheduled a presidential election for mid-March. Vladimir Putin will, if nothing unforeseen happens, get the go-ahead for another six years in his post. All independent opposition has previously been excluded from the political system.