Around two weeks ago, Alexei Navalny, perhaps the most important figure in what remains of Russia’s democratic opposition, “disappeared” within Russia’s penal system. That could have meant various things, few of them good. His health is known to have deteriorated since his arrest and incarceration under increasingly harsh regimes. Had things suddenly taken a much worse turn? And that was not the only grim possibility. Had Navalny been murdered or seriously harmed by another inmate, perhaps with the Kremlin’s encouragement, to produce the kind of (not really) plausibly deniable result Putin would like? On the other hand, people do sometimes “disappear” for a while when being transferred within the Russian prison network. It’s a part of the routine cruelty with which the system is operated.
This appears to have been the case here.
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