Transferred to unknown: Navalny, a critic, has disappeared in the Kremlin

When Navalny’s lawyer wanted to visit his client in Pokrov prison east of Moscow on Tuesday, he was told: “There is no such accused here,” Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s closest ally, wrote in Telegram. “We don’t know where Alexei is now and what prison he was taken to,” Volkov said.

Lawyer Olga Mikhailova told the state news agency TASS that Navalny was transferred to a maximum security prison, but the authorities did not specify which prison.

“All we know is that Alexei was left alone with a regime that tried to kill him before,” Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Garmisch said on social media. There are rumors that Navalny was transferred from Pokrov, 100 km east of Moscow, to the IK-6 penal colony, another 150 km to the east. Neither his lawyer nor his family have been informed.

Navalny is considered one of the fiercest opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2020, he was treated after a poisoning attack in Germany and arrested after returning to Russia in 2021 on the grounds that he violated probation terms because he did not report to police in Russia during his time in Germany. For this he received two and a half years in prison. In March, Navalny was sentenced to nine years in prison, to serve in a maximum security prison, for fraud and contempt of court. He was due to be transferred there after his appeal was rejected.