Imprisoned Kremlin critic and opposition leader Alexei Navalny has reportedly been whisked away from his penal colony and taken to an unknown location. Navalny’s press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, said on Twitter that his lawyer learned of his disappearance on Tuesday after arriving for a meeting only to be told, “There is no such convict here.” “We do not know where Alexei is now and what colony they are taking him to,” Yarmysh wrote, adding that he is now left “one-on-one with the system that has already tried to kill him.” Navalny, one of Vladimir Putin’s most ferocious critics, was detained upon arriving home from Germany in 2021 after he’d received treatment for a poison attack widely believed to be Kremlin-orchestrated. He was initially hit with a two-year term for breaking bail conditions due to the poisoning, but got an additional nine years this spring on fraud and contempt of court charges that have been condemned as politically motivated. He used his appeal hearing last month to rail against Putin’s war in Ukraine, telling the court: “You will suffer a historic defeat in this stupid war that you started. It has no purpose or meaning.”
