Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, is missing from prison, his team says

CNN
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Alexei Navalny’s lawyers said Monday they have lost contact with the jailed Russian opposition leader, who is believed to be imprisoned in a penal colony about 150 miles east of Moscow, and whose whereabouts are unknown.

Navalny was sentenced 19 years in prison In August, after he was convicted of forming an extremist community, financing extremist activities and several other crimes. He was already serving prison sentences 11 and a half years He is in a maximum security facility for fraud and other charges, which he denies.

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

Lawyers made several attempts to reach two penal colonies where Navalny was suffering Serious health problemsThat is believed to be the case, her spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said Monday. Yarmysh added that they were informed that the 47-year-old was not in the IK-6 or IK-7 penal colonies.

“On Friday and all day, neither IK-6 nor IK-7 responded to them,” Yarmysh wrote, adding that Navalny had been missing for six days. Navalny was last imprisoned in the IK-6 penal colony east of Moscow.

Navalny is scheduled to appear in court via video link on Monday, Yarmysh said. Prison authorities told Navalny’s team that he was unable to attend the hearing due to an electricity problem in the prison.

Yarmysh said she was concerned about Navalny’s recent deterioration in health.

“The fact that we cannot find Alexei is particularly worrying because he became ill in his cell last week: he became dizzy and lay on the floor. Colony staff came immediately, lowered the bed, laid Alexei down and [him] “Intravenous,” she said at X.

“We don’t know what it was like, but given that he was deprived of food, kept in a punishment cell without ventilation, and had his walking time reduced to a minimum, it looked like he was fainting from hunger,” Al-Yarmoush said. His lawyers met with him after the accident and said he was “relatively well.”

Navalny posed one of the most serious threats to Putin’s legitimacy during his rule, which extended for more than two decades. He organized Anti-government street protests He used his blog and social media to expose alleged corruption in the Kremlin as well as in Russian companies.

The dissident was transferred from Russia to Germany in 2020, after being poisoned NovichokA Soviet-era nerve gas. Navalny had to be airlifted from the Siberian city of Omsk and arrived in a coma to a hospital in Berlin.

a Joint investigation CNN and the Bellingcat group implicated the Russian Security Service (FSB) in Navalny’s poisoning. The investigation concluded that the FSB’s toxicology team of about six to 10 agents tracked Navalny for more than three years.

Later, Navalny tricked one of the spies, Konstantin Kudryavtsev He reveals how he was poisoned. He pretended to be a senior official from Russia’s National Security Council tasked with conducting an analysis of the poisoning, and telephoned Kudryavtsev, who provided a detailed description of how the nerve agents were applied to a pair of Navalny’s underwear.

Russia denies its involvement in preparing Nalvani. Putin said in December 2020 that if the Russian security service had wanted to kill Navalny, “they would have finished” the job.

Navalny was immediately imprisoned Return to Russia In January 2021, he was charged with violating the terms of his probation related to a fraud case brought against him in 2013, which he also dismissed as politically motivated.

He campaigned from prison against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and tried to rally popular opposition to the war.

We will campaign against the war. And against Putin. exactly. “It is a long, stubborn, exhausting but fundamentally important campaign, in which we will turn people against the war,” Navalny said, according to a statement on his website.

When Navalny was sentenced last August to 19 years in a high-security penal colony, he said that “the number of years does not matter.”

“I fully understand that, like many political prisoners, I am sentencing him to life imprisonment. Where life is measured by the duration of my life or the duration of the life of this system.”

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.