Some disturbing news (or absence of news) out of Russia.
Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny has been removed from the penal colony where he had been imprisoned since the middle of last year and his current whereabouts are not known, his allies said on Monday.
Navalny aides have been preparing for his expected transfer to a “special regime” colony, the harshest grade in Russia’s prison system, after he was sentenced in August to an additional 19 years in prison on top of 11-1/2 years he was already serving.
Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said staff at the IK-6 facility in Melekhovo, 235 km (145 miles) east of Moscow, had told his lawyer waiting outside that the opposition leader was no longer among its inmates.
“Where they have taken him, they refuse to say,” she said on social media platform X.
His disappearance comes at the start of the campaign period for a presidential election in which Vladimir Putin confirmed on Friday that he would stand for another six-year term.
Navalny is the single most important democratic opposition figure still alive in Russia today (a description that is not intended to slight figures such as the heroic Vladimir Kara-Murza, another prominent political prisoner sentenced to a very long term in Russia’s penal network), with part of his power coming not only from his personal bravery (he flew back into Russia after receiving treatment in Germany for a not very mysterious poisoning), but also from the strong populist (notably on the topic of corruption) and nationalist strains that run through his politics. Some of the latter will jar in the West (sometimes understandably so), but that means that Navalny has staked out a position that, in some respects, is on territory that Putin has marked out as his own, something that Russia’s leader may well find particularly disturbing.
Temporarily “disappearing” someone within the Russian penal system is not unknown, and the best guess is that Navalny will show up in a “special regime” colony, as planned. If he does, added isolation is part of the punishment, and will, of course, be politically helpful to the regime.
However, this (via the Moscow Times today) is ominous:
Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s whereabouts and condition have been unknown for nearly a week after he reportedly suffered a serious health incident, his team said on Monday.
“It has already been the sixth day since we haven’t known where Alexei is or what’s happening to him,” Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
His team said that Navalny had not been connected via video link to court hearings taking place inside the prison where he is held, with prison officials citing “electricity problems” as the reason.
“We have learned that last week he had a serious health-related incident. Navalny’s life is at great risk. He is in complete isolation right now,” Maria Pevchikh, his close ally and the chair of the board of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said Friday, adding that “his lawyers are refused entry and asked to wait.”
Even before this, Navalny’s health had been deteriorating, thanks to the conditions under which he had been held, suggesting that the Kremlin already was planning a slow murder by neglect and worse.