After losing the appeal against his second prison sentence, at the end of May, Russian opponent Alexei Navalni was transferred this Tuesday from the penal colony where he had been for a year to a still unknown prison, reported one of the their collaborators.
According to Leonid Volkov, federal police officers took the politician from the IK-2 prison colony in Pokrov, a hundred kilometers east of Moscow.
As usual in Russia, the transfer of prisoners between prisons is not communicated in advance, and only once it has been completed. Navalni’s allies found out about what had happened because one of his lawyers went to visit him in prison. After making him wait until two in the afternoon, they told him: “That convict is not here.”
“Where Alexei is now, to which colony they have taken him, we do not know,” explained Vólkov, who is the head of the anti-corruption activist’s team, in a statement published on Telegram.
Navalni was sentenced on March 22 to nine years in prison after being found guilty of fraud in the use of donations made to his foundations. In May, the appeal hearing was held in a Moscow court, but in which the opponent participated from prison. The judges confirmed the sentence.
As it was a second conviction, even then his lawyers assumed that he would be transferred to a harsh regimen colony, as he would be considered a repeat offender. There he will have fewer rights to visits and correspondence.
His spokesperson, Kira Yármish, confirmed that his lawyers and relatives had not been informed of the transfer in advance. She indicated that, according to rumors, he could be transferred to the high-security colony IK-6 Melekhovo, just like Pokrov, in Vladimir region. But it is unknown if this is actually the case.
“The problem with moving to another colony isn’t just that a high-security colony is much scarier. The whole time, until we know where Alexei is, he’s left with only a system that already tried to kill him. So now the main task is to find it as soon as possible,” Yármysh wrote on Telegram.
Alexei Navalny, 46, is Russia’s most prominent opposition leader in the last decade, just since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency after spending four years as prime minister.
After returning from Germany, where he recovered from nerve agent poisoning, he was sentenced in February 2021 to 2.5 years in prison for violating the terms of a parole for a 2014 conviction. He had been in Pokrov since then.
Navalni and his followers claim that all the accusations have been fabricated with the aim of removing him from politics. His conviction last year sparked the biggest anti-Kremlin demonstrations in years.
His anti-corruption foundation and other organizations were later declared “extremist” by the courts, effectively outlawing them.
Two weeks ago Navalni himself reported that a new case had been opened against him for creating an extremist organization and inciting hatred against the authorities. These crimes can be punished with 15 years in prison.
