After several days during which his whereabouts were unknown to his family and allies, imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was confirmed by his spokeswoman to have been transferred to a higher-security facility. In a tweet published Wednesday, spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said Navalny’s lawyer had managed to see him. “Alexei sends his greetings to everyone,” she wrote. The fierce Putin critic’s new home is the IK-6 penal colony, “a monstrous place,” according to a May tweet from Yarmysh, even by the standards of Russia’s infamous prison facilities. The colony is notorious for its record of suspicious deaths and abuse of inmates. Navalny 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 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 President Vladimir 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.”
