Alexei Navalny discovered in remote Arctic penal colony
The jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been located in a remote prison colony above the Arctic Circle after going missing for nearly three weeks, his aides have said.
Navalny was tracked down to the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region, about 1,200 miles north-east of Moscow, his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said on Monday. “We have found Alexei Navalny,” she wrote on X.
Navalny, who has been sentenced to nearly three decades in jail after building a nationwide political opposition to Vladimir Putin, disappeared from a prison in the Vladimir region near Moscow on 6 December, raising fears among his supporters about his health. A UN official described it as a “forced disappearance”.
Yarmysh said Navalny’s lawyer managed to see him on Monday and added: “He is doing well.”
Navalny’s aides had been preparing for his expected transfer to a “special regime” colony, the harshest grade in Russia’s prison system.
Russian prison transfers are notorious for taking a long time, sometimes weeks, during which there is no access to prisoners, with information about their whereabouts limited or nonexistent.
The gas-rich Yamal-Nenets autonomous region in north-western Siberia is one of Russia’s most remote places. The Kharp high-security prison colony holding Navalny was first established under Stalin in the Soviet Union as part of the Gulag network.
“The conditions there are harsh, with a special regime in the permafrost zone. It is very difficult to get there,” said Ivan Zhdanov, another Navalny associate.
Zhdanov said that Navalny’s communication with the outside world will be severely restricted by the new