“His lawyer visited him today. Alexei is doing well,” Navalny's spokesman wrote Count Garmisig When she announced that he had been found.
Alexei Navalny He has not been heard from or seen since early December, prompting his co-workers to raise 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.
And now, some 20 days later, they have received news that Russia's most famous opposition politician has been transferred to another penal colony: in the small town of Charb in the Yamalo-Neintsyn region, far north of the Ural Mountains in northwestern Siberia.
The US State Department welcomes the news of Navalny's location, but at the same time expresses in a statement its “deep concern about Navalny's safety and the circumstances of his unjust detention.”
Convicted repeatedly
Since Alexei Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021, he has been re-sentenced several times by the pro-regime judiciary. The last one was due to “extremism” – which means that sooner or later he will be transferred again to a penal colony with the highest level of security.
But no one said when or to whom. Russia's prison system is famous for, among other things, torture-filled transfers between remote penal colonies that have been in existence since Soviet times. It is not uncommon for prisoners to “disappear” for weeks or sometimes months during the transfer process. Relatives and the prisoners themselves are usually told where they will be placed when they actually arrive.
For many years, the regime has been accused of violating international law by practically disappearing people under the supervision of the authorities, officially called enforced disappearance. The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Russia warned last week that this may fall within this framework.
In recent weeks, various reports have emerged about Alexei Navalny that turned out to be false or deliberately misleading.
“I want to isolate him”
“It was clear early on that the authorities wanted to keep Alexei isolated, especially before the elections,” one of the opposition leader’s staff wrote. Ivan Zhdanov He is a prominent figure in Navalny's political movement, FBK, on social media.
He recounts how colleagues contacted all possible institutions and authorities in search of answers, until they learned that Navalny was in “one of the northern and remote colonies” – the one in Sharpe known as the “Tundra Wolf”.
“The conditions there are difficult, with a special security department in the permafrost. It is very difficult to get there,” writes Ivan Zhdanov, who adds that communication possibilities via email, for example, are limited.
The Kremlin decided to hold presidential elections in mid-March. Russian President Vladimir Putin If nothing unexpected happens, he will get the green light for another six years in office. All forms of independent opposition were previously excluded from the political system.
Alexei Navalny
He became famous from the beginning as an anti-corruption activist. But over time, Alexei Navalny (born 1976) emerged as the main opposition leader in Vladimir Putin's Russia.
He was repeatedly arrested and convicted and banned from running in general elections in the ruling political system. His FBK movement achieved widespread exposure for exposing rampant corruption in the Russian elite.
In August 2020, Navalny became acutely ill during a flight from Tomsk, Siberia. After receiving treatment for several months in a German hospital, where it was confirmed that he had been poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent, he returned to Russia on January 17, 2021.
He was immediately arrested at the airport, then sentenced to prison for breaching bail, in what is widely seen as a politically driven operation.
Last year, he was sentenced to nine years in prison after being found guilty of embezzlement and contempt of court, and in August this year he was sentenced to another 19 years in prison on extremism charges.
His supporters and the outside world view the sentences against Navalny as politically motivated and the regime's way of trying to silence criticism of the Kremlin.
Source: TT
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