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Navalny Transferred To New Facility, Whereabouts Unknown, Aide Says

By RFE/RL's Russian Service December 11, 2023

Almost a week after being held incommunicado, imprisoned Russian opposition politician and Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny has been transferred to an unspecified site, according to one of his aides.

Kira Yarmysh, Navalny's press secretary, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on December 11 that one of Navalny's lawyers was informed at the IK-6 penal colony in the Vladimir region that his client "is no longer on their list of inmates."

"They refuse to say where [Navalny] was transferred to," Yarmysh added in the post.

Earlier in the day, Yarmysh said Navalny has been held incommunicado for almost a week, while his lawyers have not been allowed to meet with him in the penal colony.

Navalny is serving a total of 19 years in prison on extremism and other charges that he rejects as politically motivated.

His transfer to a harsher "special regime" facility was seen as a possibility when he had his sentence increased to 19 years in August after being found guilty of creating an extremist organization.

The move comes just days after Navalny's team launched a billboard campaign asking Russians to vote against President Vladimir Putin, who on December 8 said he would run in a March 17 presidential election.

Navalny's Anticorruption Foundation (FBK) paid for the billboards putting the messages "Russia" and "Happy New Year" on them. A QR code was also printed on the signs, and they led to a website titled Russia Without Putin, which encouraged voters not to cast ballots for Putin. Less than a day later, billboards with QR codes were outlawed.

Yarmysh, and another of Navalny's associates, Ruslan Shavetdinov, said earlier that Navalny felt extremely unwell in his cell in late November and early December after prison guards deprived him of food and fresh air, keeping him in solitary confinement and limiting his walks outside the cell.

Navalny's current isolation from the outside world coincided with a campaign his team launched on December 7 against Putin. That day, the Russian parliament's upper chamber, the Federation Council, set March 17, 2024, as the date for a presidential election.

The White House expressed concerns over reports about Navalny being kept incommunicado for nearly a week.

"We are deeply concerned about these reports," National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on December 11 aboard Air Force One. "He should be released immediately."

Putin, who has led the country as a prime minister or president since 1999, is eligible to take part in two more presidential elections due to constitutional amendments introduced in 2020. He is expected to easily win the poll.

Navalny's previous sentence was handed down in 2021 after he arrived in Moscow from Germany, where he had been recovering from a poisoning attack he blamed on the Kremlin, which the Kremlin denied.

He was Russia's loudest opposition voice and galvanized huge anti-government rallies before he was jailed.

Three of Navalny's former lawyers -- Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin, and Aleksei Lipster -- were taken into custody in October and charged with taking part an extremist group's activities because of their association with Navalny and his anti-corruption foundation.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-navalny-prison-moved- incommunicado/32725465.html

Copyright (c) 2023. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.