The jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been located in a remote prison colony above the Arctic Circle after going missing for nearly three weeks, his aides have said.
Navalny was tracked down to the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region, about 1,200 miles north-east of Moscow, his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said on Monday. “We have found Alexei Navalny,” she wrote on X.
Navalny, who has been sentenced to nearly three decades in jail after building a nationwide political opposition to Vladimir Putin, disappeared from a prison in the Vladimir region near Moscow on 6 December, raising fears among his supporters about his health. A UN official described it as a “forced disappearance”.
Yarmysh said Navalny’s lawyer managed to see him on Monday and added: “He is doing well.”
Navalny’s aides had been preparing for his expected transfer to a “special regime” colony, the harshest grade in Russia’s prison system.
Russian prison transfers are notorious for taking a long time, sometimes weeks, during which there is no access to prisoners, with information about their whereabouts limited or nonexistent.
The gas-rich Yamal-Nenets autonomous region in north-western Siberia is one of Russia’s most remote places. The Kharp high-security prison colony holding Navalny was first established under Stalin in the Soviet Union as part of the Gulag network.
“The conditions there are harsh, with a special regime in the permafrost zone. It is very difficult to get there,” said Ivan Zhdanov, another Navalny associate.
Zhdanov said that Navalny’s communication with the outside world will be severely restricted by the new location. “Many thanks to our supporters, activists, journalists and the media who are concerned about Alexei’s fate and who do not get tired of writing about the situation,” he added.
On Monday night the US state department welcomed reports that Navalny had been located but said it remained “deeply concerned” about his wellbeing.
“We welcome reports that Mr Navalny has been located. However, we remain deeply concerned for Mr. Navalny’s wellbeing and the conditions of his unjust detention,” a spokesperson said. “We have conveyed to the Russian government that they are responsible for what happens to Mr Navalny in their custody.”
It called for Navalny’s immediate release and accused Russia of repressing independent voices in the country. Russia denies carrying out such a crackdown.
Navalny’s allies previously linked the timing of his disappearance to President Putin’s announcement to seek re-election in Russia’s 2024 presidential race.
“It was clear from the beginning that the authorities wanted to isolate Alexei, especially before the elections,” Zhdanov said on Monday.
Putin is the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Stalin and could surpass him if he continues to run for a sixth term in power.
Navalny’s supporters have launched an anti-Putin campaign including billboards in Moscow, St Petersburg and Novosibirsk, with a QR-code linking to a website that calls for Putin critics to use non-violent “partisan” tactics to express their dissent.
Navalny, the anti-corruption activist who became a leading opponent of Putin, was poisoned in Russia with novichok in 2020, evacuated to Germany for treatment, and then returned to Russia in 2021, where he was arrested, convicted on fraud and extremism charges, and sentenced to three decades in prison.
His supporters say he has suffered from mysterious stomach ailments in jail and believe that he is likely to be kept incarcerated for as long as Putin remains in power.
The Russian authorities have previously detained three lawyers representing Navalny in what his allies said was an attempt to “completely isolate” him.
