Almost three weeks after losing contact with him, the collaborators and lawyers of the imprisoned Russian opponent Alexei Navalny now know where he is. After being transferred from prison, a process that usually lasts a long time in Russia, his team said this Monday that they found him in the IK-3 penal colony in Jarp, a town in the Russian autonomous district of Yamalo-Nenets, located in the Urals. and 60 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.
The anti-corruption activist’s journey from the IK-6 penal colony in Melekhovo, 230 kilometers from Moscow, to Jarp, lasted almost three weeks. It is assumed that the journey, about 1,900 kilometers, has been covered by train.
Jarp is an urban-type settlement with a population of 5,000 people. It is located 50 kilometers from Salekhard, the administrative capital of a territory with an area like France but with a population of half a million inhabitants.
“Alexéi is fine,” the anti-corruption activist’s spokesperson, Kira Yármish, wrote on social network X this Monday. A lawyer for Navalni has been able to see him, she added. The last contact occurred 20 days ago.
The penal colony is located in the center of the town and, according to the newspaper Moskovski Komsomólets, it was created in the 1960s, years after Stalin’s death, to be part of the network of prisons that formed the system under the Soviet dictator. of the Gulag.
Until Navalny’s arrival, the most famous prisoner who had passed through the doors of Jarp’s IK-3 had been Platon Lébedev, an associate of the former oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who has now become an opponent of Putin in exile, and, like him, condemned. for fraud and money laundering at the beginning of this century.
Navalny’s collaborators, 47, were warned that it was very likely that the Russian prison authorities would transfer him to a “special regime” penal colony (the most severe), since last August he received his last conviction for extremism, accompanied by a sentence of 19 years in prison. Added to the 11.5 years that he was already serving for fraud, the only Russian politician who in the last decade has kept Russian President Vladimir Putin awake at night, will be behind bars for three decades.
He and his followers maintain that all these convictions, and the future trials he could still face, are political persecution by those in power. His team believes that they will not let him out of prison as long as Putin remains at the head of the Kremlin.
The imprisoned politician’s team raised the alarm after his lawyers, who had seen him the day before, were unable to meet with him on December 6. In the Melejovo prison they were simply told that he was no longer on their list of inmates.
The transfer of prisoners to another penitentiary center is usually carried out in Russia by rail, usually takes weeks and the family and lawyers are only informed when it is completed.
The anxiety of not knowing what the prisoner’s final fate would be was joined by fear for his health. His associates have reported that Navalni has not been well fed and that he has been sent to the isolation cell on at least twenty occasions.
Last week, the United Nations rapporteur for Russia, Mariana Katzarova, also expressed concern about the opponent’s health and said that the Russian opponent has not received adequate medical treatment for almost two years.
“I am extremely concerned that the Russian authorities do not report where and how Navalny is for such a long period of time, something that could be considered a forced disappearance,” he said in a statement.
Navalni’s team will now have a more difficult time communicating and having contact with the opponent, who from now on will live in one of the Russian prisons furthest from civilization.
“The conditions are harsh, as it is a (prison) with a special regime in the permafrost zone. It is very difficult to get there,” said another of Navalny’s partners on social networks, lawyer Iván Zhdanov, who pointed out which is known as the “Polar Wolf” prison.
According to him, the geographical location of the place will mean that its contact with the outside world will be severely restricted. The weather doesn’t help either. Next week temperatures in Jarp are expected to drop to minus 28 degrees Celsius.
“Many thanks to our followers, activists, journalists and media who were concerned about Navalni’s fate and who did not tire of writing about the situation,” he added.
Navalni’s associates also make a political reading of his current transfer, as it coincides with the start of the presidential election campaign, scheduled for March 15, 16 and 17 and in which Vladimir Putin will opt for re-election to be in the Kremlin a fifth term. Navalny has asked to vote for “any candidate” other than Putin.
