Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny located in Arctic prison 3 weeks after contact with him lost
- Navalny was located in a remote prison colony after his lawyers said they had not been able to reach him since December 6
- He has been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recovering in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin
Associates of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said on Monday that he has been located at a prison colony above the Arctic Circle nearly three weeks after contact with him was lost.
Navalny, the most prominent foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism. He had been imprisoned in the Vladimir region of central Russia, about 230 kilometres (140 miles) east of Moscow, but his lawyers said they had not been able to reach him since December 6.
His spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said on X, formerly Twitter, that he was located in a prison colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenetsk region about 1,900 kilometres (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.
The region is notorious for long and severe winters; the town is near Vorkuta, whose coal mines were among the harshest of the Soviet Gulag prison-camp system.
“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,” Navalny’s chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, said on X.