2023-12-25 15:31:27
Finally some news. In prison since January 2021, Alexeï Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s most famous political opponent, had not given any sign of life since the beginning of December. No one even knew where he was.
This Monday, his spokesperson said that he was currently detained in a penal colony in the Arctic. “His lawyer visited him today, he is fine,” she said on the social network X.
We have found Alexey @navalny. He is now in IK-3 in the settlement of Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District. His lawyer visited him today. Alexey is doing well.
— Kira Yarmysh (@Kira_Yarmysh) December 25, 2023
A trip that could be linked to the presidential election
“Its location was hidden,” said Ivan Zhdanov, lawyer and director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, explaining that Alexei Navalny’s advice had searched numerous detention centers and colonies. It was finally in Kharp, a small town of around 5,000 inhabitants located in Yamalo-Nenetsia – a remote region in northern Russia located beyond the Arctic Circle – that they found the trace of the political opponent. “The conditions there are harsh and it is very difficult to get there,” he said in a press release published on X.
For this person close to Navalny, the upcoming presidential election in Russia in March 2024, for which Vladimir Putin said he would run again, is not for nothing in this sudden disappearance from the radars.
Sentenced in August to a 19-year prison sentence for “extremism” – in addition to the eleven years he was already serving – Alexeï Navalny, anti-corruption activist and pet peeve of Vladimir Putin, was to be transferred to a penal colony under a “regime”. special”, the strictest level of the Russian prison system usually reserved for lifers and the most dangerous inmates. In Russia, transfers from one penal colony to another often take several weeks of train travel with stages, with detainees’ relatives not being heard from during this period.
#Russian #opponent #Alexeï #Navalny #penal #colony #Arctic