Putin’s nemesis Alexei Navalny found in polar penal colony after disappearing
The jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny has been tracked down in the brutal ‘Polar Wolf’ penal colony north of the Arctic Circle over two weeks after his supporters lost all trace of him, his spokeswoman has said.
His supporters had voiced concern for his life and wellbeing after losing touch with him for nearly three weeks.
Mr Navalny has now been tracked down to the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the far northern Yamal-Nenets region, about 1,200 miles north-east of Moscow, Kira Yarmysh, his spokeswoman, said.
She added that his lawyer had managed to see him on Monday.
“This prison will be much worse than the one that was before,” she told Reuters TV. “They are trying to make his life as unbearable as it possibly can be.
“They definitely try to isolate Alexei and to make it more difficult to access him.”
He was “fine — at least as much as possible after such a long stage” and his lawyer’s visit, Ms Yarmysh told the Associated Press.
Mr Navalny, the most high-profile opponent of the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin, had been held in prison in the Vladimir region of central Russia, having been imprisoned for 19 years on extremism charges.
However, his lawyers had been unable to contact him since 6 December.
Mr Navalny’s allies, who had been preparing for his expected transfer to a “special regime” colony, the harshest level in Russia’s prison system, raised the alarm.
His new home, known as “the Polar Wolf” colony, is considered to be one of the harshest prisons in Russia, in a region known for its long and severe winters, with temperatures expected to drop to -28C this week.
The town is 60 miles from Vorkuta, whose coal mines were among the harshest of the Soviet Gulag system of forced labour camps, in which millions died.
“The conditions there are harsh, with a special regime in the permafrost,” Mr Navalny’s chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, said on X.
“It is almost impossible to get to this colony; it is almost impossible to even send letters there. This is the highest possible level of isolation from the world,” Mr Navalny’s chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, said on X.
