This Monday the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had to appear in a court session by videoconference from prison. But he has not appeared, and that has set off alarm bells among his followers and his team, who have reported “not having heard from him for almost a week.”
According to officials at the IK-6 penal colony in Melekhovo, Vladimir Oblast, communication was not possible due to “problems with electricity.” This further increased the concern of his collaborators, who have been denouncing for some time that the activist has health problems, since they do not feed him well and he has been sent to solitary confinement on at least twenty occasions.
“We learned last week that he had had a serious health incident. Navalni’s life is in great danger. Right now he is in complete isolation. His lawyers are not allowed to enter and are asked to wait,” María Pévchij said on Friday. , who directs the Anti-Corruption Foundation that the activist created.
The last time his lawyers had contact with Navalni was on Tuesday, December 5. And only this Monday at the last minute they received a clue about his whereabouts, her spokesperson, Kira Yármish, reported on the social network X. In the IK-6 penal colony, Alexei Navalni, 47, is no longer part of the prisoner list.
This suggests that he is being transferred to another prison. But “they refused to say where,” Yármish wrote. This process, which is carried out by rail, can take weeks and the family and lawyers are only informed when it is finished.
Navalny is supposedly being sent to a “special regime” prison (the most severe system) after he received a new 19-year sentence in August for extremism and other charges. Added to the 11.5 years he was already serving, he will remain in prison for three decades. His followers maintain that the accusations have been fabricated to expel him from politics.
Navalni’s collaborators also make a political reading of his current transfer, as it coincides with the start of the presidential campaign and with the announcement made on Friday by the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, that he will run again in the elections to be re-elected for the fifth time. “It is no secret to Putin who his main opponent is in these ‘elections’. And he wants to be sure that Navalny’s voice is not heard,” his assistant Leonid Volkov wrote in X.
