They are looking for their friend in the regime’s prisons. Supporters of Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, who is serving a nineteen-year prison sentence, said Monday that they have been trying to contact him in vain for almost a week and do not know where he is. His lawyers went on Friday then Monday to “two penal colonies in the Vladimir region [à l’est de Moscou] where Alexeï Navalny could be” but learned “that he was not there”, declared his spokesperson Kira Iarmich. One of these prisons indicated that the opponent “no longer appeared on their registers”, refusing to say “where he had been transferred”, she wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
“We still don’t know where Alexei is,” she said. A little earlier, she had indicated that it had been “six days” since her team had heard from him.
The emblematic opponent of Vladimir Putin notably missed a court hearing at which he was to appear by videoconference, an absence justified by a power outage according to the prison authorities, added Kira Iarmich. “They’re making fun of us,” she said.
Washington “concerned”
Washington reacted by saying it was “very concerned” by the lack of information regarding the whereabouts of Alexeï Navalny, once again calling for his immediate release. “He should never have been imprisoned in the first place,” said John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, indicating that American authorities were seeking to know more.
Until then detained in the Vladimir region, Alexeï Navalny must be transferred according to his new sentence of nineteen years in prison for “extremism”, pronounced in August, to a penal colony with a “special regime”. Transfers from one penal colony to another in Russia often take several weeks of train travel with stages, with detainees’ relatives not being heard from during this time. “Special regime” colonies are the establishments with the harshest conditions of detention in the Russian prison system, and are often located in very isolated regions.
Arrested in January 2021 Alexeï Navalny, 47, has been alternating stays in solitary confinement with more or less strict detention conditions for almost three years.