Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has disappeared from prison

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has disappeared from prison

A. Navalnas is serving a 19-year prison sentence on charges of extremism, and this summer the court ordered to transfer him to a special regime colony, the strictest type of prison.

“We still don’t know where Alexei is,” his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said on social media.

She said Navalny’s lawyers tried to visit him at IK-6, where he was being held, and visited IK-7, a special regime colony in the same region.

“They were just informed in both colonies at the same time that he was not there,” said the lawyer. “They refuse to say where they took him.”

A. Navalnas had already served 11 and a half years in a high-security institution for fraud and other charges, which he denies.

Navalny’s supporters say his arrest and imprisonment are a politically motivated attempt to stifle his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The lawyer added that A. Navalnas has been missing for six days. For the last time, A. Navalnas was imprisoned in the IK-6 colony east of Moscow.

A. Navalnas disappeared at the time when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he would seek a fifth term.

Allies of the opposition leader believe that he was taken out of the Vladimir region.

“He can be anywhere,” said Leonidas Volkov, another ally of Navalny. “Worse, it could be postponed for a few weeks.”

A. Navalny posed one of the biggest threats to V. Putin’s legitimacy during his more than two decades of rule. He organized anti-government street protests and used his blog and social media to expose alleged corruption in the Kremlin and Russian business.

He was poisoned

The dissident was deported from Russia to Germany in 2020. after being poisoned by the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. A. Navalny had to be transported by plane from the Siberian city of Omsk, and he arrived at the Berlin hospital in a coma.

A joint investigation by CNN and the Bellingcat group into A. Navalny’s poisoning revealed that the Russian Security Service (FSB) was to blame.

Russia denies that it contributed to the poisoning of A. Navalny. V. Putin in 2020 said in December that if the Russian security service had wanted to kill Navalny, it “would have completed” the job.

in 2021 After returning to Russia in January, A. Navalnas was immediately imprisoned on charges of violating the terms of his parole related to the 2013 a fraud case has been filed against him, which he has also dismissed as politically motivated.

From prison, he campaigned against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and tried to mobilize public opposition to the war.

“We will conduct an election campaign against the war. And against Putin. Exactly. A long, persistent, tiring but fundamentally important campaign to turn people against war,” he said in a statement on his website.

When Navalny was sentenced in August to 19 years in a maximum-security correctional colony, he said “the number of years doesn’t matter.”

“I am well aware that I, like many political prisoners, have been given a life sentence. Where life is measured by the term of my life or the term of the life of this regime,” he said in a statement.

VIDEO: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has disappeared from prison



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2024-08-12 17:04:51

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