Alexei Navalny, long considered the main opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been transferred in a new penal colony in northern Russia. His spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said this, specifying that he is currently in Charp, about 1,900 kilometers north-east of Moscow, and that his lawyer was able to see him on Monday. It is the first time that we have had certain news about Navalny since the beginning of December: in recent weeks he had not shown up at some hearings of the trials in which he is involved, in which he had been participating for some time via videoconference, and he no longer appeared on the list of the inmates of the maximum security prison where he had been held since June 2022.
Navalny, who is 47 years old, is in prison on charges that the vast majority of commentators and experts on freedom of expression consider specious, including that of having founded and financed activities and organizations that the Russian authorities consider “extremist”. Mariana Katzarova, a United Nations official, had called her absence an “enforced disappearance.”
Navalny is currently accused in 14 trials in which he could be sentenced to up to 35 years in prison, which would be added to the 30 he is already serving. Until recently he was detained in a maximum security prison about 240 kilometers east of Moscow, but on 8 December some of his collaborators made it known that they had not heard from him for three days: based on the most recent information about him , had fallen ill due to the poor conditions in which he was detained, including the shortage of food and poor ventilation in his cell.
One possibility was that he may have been hospitalized; another, in fact, that he had been transferred to a “special regime” prison, the harshest level of the Russian prison system, as one of the courts that are dealing with his many trials had decided in August.
So far, however, no hypothesis had been confirmed, and not even the Russian government knew for sure where it was located, at least formally: Russian government spokesman Dmitri Peskov had said that Russia did not have “the ability, the right or the desire to track of the destinies of prisoners who are serving a sentence issued by a court”.
The lawyer who managed to meet Navalny, Ivan Zhdanov, said that in recent weeks he and his aides had asked 618 times for information on his whereabouts. In a message shared on Telegram, Yarmysh wrote that is fine.