Kremlin critic Navalny moved to Arctic penal colony
MOSCOW—Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been moved to a penal colony in the Arctic, allies said on Monday after over two weeks during which his whereabouts were unknown.
Navalny on Tuesday confirmed his arrival at what he described as a snow-swept prison above the Arctic Circle and said he was in excellent spirits despite a tiring 20-day journey to get there.
Authorities moved Russia’s most prominent opposition politician to the isolated penal colony three months before a presidential vote expected to easily hand Vladimir Putin a fifth term.
“We have found Alexei Navalny,” his ally, Kira Yarmysh, said on social media. “He is now in IK-3 in the settlement of Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District,” Yarmysh added. “His lawyer visited him today. Alexei is doing well.”
The district of Kharp, home to about 5,000 people, is located above the Arctic Circle.
It is “one of the most northern and remote colonies,” said Ivan Zhdanov, who manages Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
“Conditions there are harsh, with a special regime in the permafrost zone” and very little contact to the outside world, Zhdanov said.
Western concernNavalny posted an update on X via his lawyers after his allies lost touch with him for more than two weeks while he was in transit with no information about where he was being taken, prompting expressions of concern from Western politicians.
“I am your new Father Frost,” Navalny wrote jokingly in his first post from his new prison, a reference to the harsh weather conditions there.
“Well, I now have a sheepskin coat, an ushanka hat (a fur hat with ear-covering flaps), and soon I will get valenki (traditional Russian winter footwear).
“The 20 days of the transfer were quite tiring, but I’m still in an excellent mood, as Father Frost should be.”
Navalny’s new home, known as “the Polar Wolf” colony, is considered to be one of the toughest prisons in Russia. Most prisoners there have been convicted of grave crimes. Winters are harsh—and temperatures are due to drop to around minus 28 Celsius there over the next week.
About 60 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, the prison was founded in the 1960s as part of what was once the Gulag system of forced Soviet labor camps, according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.
Washington welcomed reports that the dissident was finally located alive but slammed Moscow for its “malicious targeting of Navalny and the more than 600 other political prisoners Russia has imprisoned.”
The State Department said it remained “deeply concerned for Mr. Navalny’s wellbeing and the conditions of his unjust detention.” —reports from AFP, REUTERS
