Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been transferred from his prison colony to an unknown location, his press officer said on Tuesday (June 14).
Kira Yarmysh tweeted that Navalny had been taken from penal colony No.2 in Pokrov – some 74 miles (119km) east of Moscow – and that “we do not know where Alexei is now and what colony they are taking him to”.
Yarmysh said they only found out about Navalny’s apparent relocation when his lawyer was told at a prison checkpoint that there was “no such convict here”.
Russia’s highest-profile opposition leader over the last decade, Navalny was jailed for two-and-a-half years for parole violations in February 2021 after returning from Germany, where he had been recovering from an apparent nerve agent poisoning in Russia that he accuses the Kremlin of ordering.
On March 24, Navalny was sentenced to a further nine years in prison for fraud and contempt of court.
The opposition leader says the charges against him are fabricated and aimed at thwarting his political ambitions.
The judge ordered that Navalny, who has lambasted Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine as “stupid”, be transferred to a maximum-security prison, where his rights to visits and correspondence would be reduced.
Navalny had previously been serving his sentence at the correctional facility in Pokrov.
Navalny’s political network has been largely dismantled since his jailing, having been banned as an “extremist” organization.
Senior aides and organizers have either been jailed or forced into exile.
Navalny said two weeks ago that he had been charged in a new criminal case with creating an extremist organization and inciting hatred towards the authorities, offences that could add up to 15 more years to his sentence.
(Reuters)