Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny remains in Siberian penal colony two weeks after disappearance

CNN
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Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny remains in a penal colony in Siberia, his group said Monday, two weeks after losing contact with him.

“We have found Alexey,” his spokeswoman, Kira Yarmish X, said in a statement earlier on Twitter. “He is now in IK-3 in the Karp settlement in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District.”

He said Navalny's lawyer had met with him earlier on Monday and said the jailed activist was “doing well”.

Navalny's lawyers said on December 11 He lost touch with him. Until then, he was imprisoned in a penal colony 150 miles east of Moscow.

Navalny said last week that his team had “not been hidden for so long” after pulling out of two scheduled court hearings. They warned that he was ill before he disappeared “without food” and “in a punishment cell with no ventilation”.

He disappeared within days of Russian President Vladimir Putin's announcement Run for re-election in March 2024, prompting concerns for his well-being and safety.

Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny's anti-corruption foundation, called the IK-3 penal colony in the city of Karp, “Polar Wolf,” “one of the northern and most remote colonies.”

“The conditions there are harsh with a special regime in the permafrost zone. It is very difficult to get there, there are no means of mail delivery,” Zhdanov wrote in X.

Zhdanov said Navalny's lawyer was “immediately” not allowed into the penal colony.

“The colony seems to have prepared in advance for his arrival. The head of the Federal Penitentiary Service, Arkady Kostev, was there in April, and perhaps they decided to transfer Alexei there,” he added.

Corp is nearly 2,000 miles from Moscow, where Navalny was previously arrested.

He was sentenced 19 years in prison in August after being found guilty of creating a terrorist community, financing terrorist activities and other offences. He was already serving a sentence 11 and a half years He pleads not guilty in a maximum security facility on fraud and other charges.

Navalny's supporters say his arrest and imprisonment are a politically motivated attempt to stifle his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Navalny has It was one of the most serious threats to Putin's legitimacy during his reign. He used his blog and social media to expose the Kremlin and Russian business and organized corruption Street protests against the government.

In 2020, Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent, and airlifted from the Siberian city of Omsk to a hospital in Berlin, where he fell into a coma.

A Joint investigation The Russian Security Service (FSB) was implicated in Navalny's poisoning by CNN and the Bellinggate team. Russia was not implicated in Nalwani's poisoning. Putin said in December 2020 that if Russian security services had wanted to kill Navalny, they would have “finished” the job.

Navalny was immediately imprisoned Return to Russia In January 2021, he was charged with violating the terms of his probation in a 2013 fraud case, which he also denied was politically motivated..

This is a developing story and will be updated.