Anti-Putin activist ‘forcibly drafted’, sent to Arctic base

RUSSIAN opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Wednesday that one of his allies had been forcibly conscripted and sent to serve at a remote Arctic base, in a move his supporters said amounted to kidnapping.

Ruslan Shaveddinov, a project manager at Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation, went missing Monday after police broke into his Moscow flat and his phone’s SIM card was disabled.

He resurfaced Tuesday at a secret air defence base on the remote Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, Navalny said.

Separating the Barents and Kara seas, the Novaya Zemlya islands were used by the Soviet Union to conduct nuclear tests.

“He has been unlawfully deprived of freedom,” Navalny

-- President Vladimir Putin’s top opponent -- said in a blog post, calling the 23-yearold a “political prisoner”.

The Russian military insisted that Shaveddinov had been dodging the draft for a long time.

Russian men are eligible for conscription between the ages of 18 and 27 and serve one year’s military service. However, many find ways to avoid this in a corrupt, flawed system.