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 spokesperson 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 over a thousand 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.”
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 a hundred miles east of Moscow.
Navalny, one of the most prominent critics of President Vladimir Putin, 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.
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