Alexei Navalny has been removed from the IK-6 penal colony in the Vladimir region which is located east of Moscow, his allies said claiming that the Russian opposition politician’s current whereabouts are not known. As Alexei Navalny’s aides prepared for his possible transfer to a harsher-regime colony after he was sentenced in August to an additional 19 years in prison, his spokesman Kira Yarmysh said that staff at the IK-6 colony in the town of Melekhovo had told his lawyer that the opposition leader was no longer among its inmates, news agency Reuters reported.
“Where they have taken him, they refuse to say,” Kira Yarmysh said on social media platform X (formerly Twitter).
Alexei Navalny’s disappearance comes at the start of the campaign period for a presidential election in which Vladimir Putin will stand for another six-year term. Alexei Navalny aide Leonid Volkov posted on X that the timing was “0% coincidence and 100% direct manual political control from the Kremlin.”
“It is no secret to Putin who his main opponent is in these ‘elections’. And he wants to make sure that Navalny’s voice is not heard,” he said.
Kremlin did not respond to Alexei Navalny’s disappearance claim.
Alexei Navalny has often attacked the Kremlin through his lawyers describing his ordeal behind bars and condemning Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine. Three of his lawyers were arrested in October on suspicion of “extremist” activity.
Vikram Sharma is a globe-trotting journalist with a global perspective on international events. His articles offer readers a global perspective on international events, exploring complex geopolitical issues and providing insights into the world’s most pressing challenges.
