Alexei Navalny throughout a court docket listening to in September
Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny is alive and being held in a penal colony in Siberia, based on his spokeswoman.
“We found Alexei Navalny,” Kira Yarmysh stated on 25 December, including that he was now in northern Russia.
His team had had no contact with him since 6 December, after he was moved from a earlier jail.
Mr Navalny, thought-about one in all Vladimir Putin’s main opponents, has been imprisoned since 2021.
“His lawyer saw him today. Alexei is fine,” Ms Yarmysh wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
She stated he had been moved to the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp within the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, in northern Russia.
He had beforehand been held in Melekhovo, 235 km (145 miles) east of Moscow.
The new jail, nicknamed the “Polar Wolf” colony, is taken into account one of many hardest in Russia. Most detainees held there have been convicted of significant crimes.
Ms Yarmysh stated Russian authorities had been intent on isolating Mr Navalny and “trying to make his life as unbearable as possible”.
“This colony is very distant, it is very difficult to access it and for lawyers, it will be very difficult to go there and to see Alexei,” she added.
Mr Navalny’s aide Ivan Zhadov stated that Mr Navalny’s transfer demonstrated how “the system deals with political prisoners, trying to isolate and suppress them”.
His team had grown more and more nervous after he failed to seem at a number of court docket hearings.
Mr Navalny made his title as a campaigner in opposition to corruption, gathering hundreds of thousands of views for his video investigations.
A charismatic campaigner, he gave the impression to be the one Russian opposition leader able to mobilising folks in giant numbers throughout Russia to participate in anti-government protests.
But in 2020, he was poisoned in Siberia by what Western laboratories later confirmed to be a nerve agent.
He was handled overseas. On returning to Russia in 2021, he was instantly arrested.
