Alexei Navalny found in arctic prison, easing fears over his safety

Europe
By Editor_1
Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny takes part in a march in memory of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in Moscow, Russia on Feb. 29, 2020. Associates of the imprisoned Russian opposition leader say he has been located at a prison colony above the Arctic Circle nearly three weeks after contact with him was lost. Navalny, the most prominent foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism -Pavel Golovkin/AP/File
By Ivan Nechepurenko and Anton Troianovski

MOSCOW – Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been moved to a remote Arctic prison and “is doing well,” his spokesperson said Monday (25), ending a 20-day mystery over his whereabouts that had many supporters fearing the worst.

“We have found Aleksei,” the spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said on social media. “His lawyer saw him today.”

Yarmysh’s announcement ended a frantic search through Russia’s vast prison system for Navalny, who disappeared Dec. 5. Navalny’s exiled allies said that they had found him in the remote penal colony in the Arctic after sending more than 600 requests to prisons and other government agencies.

Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation, said that Navalny’s lawyers had also looked through every pre-trial detention centre.

“From the beginning, it was clear that the government wanted to isolate Alexei, especially ahead of the election,” Zhdanov said, referring to the coming presidential race in Russia that President Vladimir Putin is widely expected to win.

There has been no immediate response from the Kremlin to Navalny’s transfer. Throughout his absence from the public eye, the Russian government had been dismissive about his whereabouts. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, said on Dec. 14 that the Kremlin had “neither the possibility nor rights or desire to trace the fate of convicts,” referring to Navalny.

Over the last decade, Navalny has been the only Russian opposition politician who posed a serious challenge to Putin’s monopoly over the country’s political landscape. He built a robust political organization with offices across the country and drew thousands to his anti-Kremlin rallies. Over the last few years, the Russian government went to great lengths to dismantle the infrastructure he had created. Many of his allies had to flee Russia or were arrested.

Navalny’s new penal colony, officially known as IK-3 Polar Wolf, is in the settlement of Kharp and is among the harshest and remotest prisons in Russia. Inmates endure long, dark, cold winters as well as clouds of mosquitoes in the summer. The penal colony is a successor to a Gulag labour camp, established there for prison workers building a railway across the Russian Arctic, ordered by Josef Stalin, but never finished in full.

Navalny’s previous prison, in the town of Melekhovo, was only about 160 miles east of Moscow, meaning that his lawyers could drive there in a manner of hours. In contrast, the new prison is some 1,200 miles from the capital. A train to Kharp, called the Polar Arrow, departs Moscow every second day and takes 44 hours to reach the town.

“Alexei’s situation is a clear example of how the system treats political prisoners, trying to isolate and suppress them,” Zhdanov said on social media.

Ivan Vostrikov, former head of Navalny’s office in the town of Tyumen, in Siberia, said he had been to Kharp several times. He described the town as “a very beautiful place with a very tough winter.”

“It is practically impossible to run away from it — on the one side there is tundra,” he said in a post on Telegram, a social messaging app. “On the other, there are rocky mountains of Polar Urals,” he added. “That’s why they put the worst criminals and serial killers there.”

Navalny’s allies had been expecting his transfer to one of Russia’s stricter prisons — known as “special regime” prison colonies — since September when he lost an appeal against the 19-year sentence he is serving.

Detainees being transferred to remote prisons in Russia can spend weeks being shuttled between trains in special rail cars and have little or no access to the outside world. But Navalny’s disappearance made headlines almost immediately because of his high-profile status in the Russian political system.

Navalny has been in custody in Russia since his detention in January 2021 at a Moscow airport, where he had arrived after spending months in Germany recovering from poisoning by a nerve agent. Navalny and Western governments accused the Kremlin of the poisoning, which Russian officials denied.

Since then, Russian authorities have brought forth a multitude of new charges against Navalny. According to Yarmysh, he is currently a defendant in 14 criminal cases and faces potential sentences of up to 35 years in prison.

-New York Times

 

 

 

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