Evgenia Novozhenina/Portal/File
Alexei Navalny can be seen on a screen via video transmission from the IK-2 penal colony in Pokrov on May 17, 2022.
CNN –
Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been located in a penal colony in Siberia, his team said on Monday, two weeks after they lost contact with him.
“We have found Alexey,” his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter. “He is now in IK-3 in the settlement of Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.”
She said Navalny's lawyer had visited him earlier on Monday and that the detained activist was “doing well.”
Navalny's lawyers said on December 11 that they had lost contact with him. Until then, he was imprisoned in a penal colony about 150 miles east of Moscow.
Navalny has “never stayed hidden for so long,” his team said, after he was absent from two scheduled court hearings last week. They warned that he was in poor health before his disappearance because he was “deprived of food” and kept “in a punishment cell with no ventilation.”
His disappearance, which came just days after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he would run for re-election in March 2024, had raised concerns about his well-being and safety.
Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, said the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp where Navalny is now held, known as the “Arctic Wolf,” was “one of the northernmost and most remote colonies.”
“The conditions there are harsh, with a special regime in the permafrost zone. It is very difficult to get there and there are no letter delivery systems,” Zhdanov wrote on X.
Zhdanov said Navalny's lawyer was not allowed into the penal colony “immediately.”
“It appears that the colony was prepared in advance for his arrival. The head of the Federal Penitentiary Service, Arkady Gostev, was there in April, and perhaps it was then that it was decided to transfer Alexey there,” he added.
Kharp is nearly 2,000 miles from Moscow, where Navalny was previously held.
He was sentenced to 19 years in prison in August after being found guilty of creating an extremist community, financing extremist activities and numerous other crimes. He was already serving an 11-and-a-half-year sentence in a maximum-security facility on fraud and other charges, which he denies.
Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images
Navalny, who was arrested at a protest rally in Moscow in 2012, has been a thorn in Putin's side for more than a decade.
Supporters of Navalny claim his arrest and detention are a politically motivated attempt to suppress his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Navalny has posed one of the biggest threats to Putin's legitimacy during his rule. He used his blog and social media to expose suspected corruption in the Kremlin and the Russian economy and organized street protests against the government.
In 2020, Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent, and flown from the Siberian city of Omsk to a hospital in Berlin, where he arrived in a coma.
A joint investigation by CNN and the group Bellingcat found that the Russian Security Service (FSB) was involved in Navalny's poisoning. Russia denies involvement in Nalvany's poisoning. Putin said in December 2020 that if Russian intelligence had wanted to kill Navalny, they would have “finished” the job.
Navalny was immediately detained upon his return to Russia in January 2021 on charges of violating his probation in connection with a fraud case brought against him in 2013, which he also dismissed as politically motivated.
This is a developing story and will be updated.