Russian Activist Serving 4-Year Sentence Unreachable, Stirring Concern

Russian activist Andrei Pivovarov, a prominent critic of the Putin administration who is serving a four-year prison sentence over his political activities, has not been reachable for several weeks, stirring concern among those close to him. Last his relatives heard, he was being transferred to a new detention site. “We don’t know if he’s alive; if he’s feeling well; if he’s being tortured or abused somehow,” his partner, Tatyana Usmanova, told the Associated Press. “We don’t know anything.” The director of Amnesty International’s Russia operations, meanwhile, blasted Pivovarov’s detention on “politically motivated charges for a ‘crime’ that doesn’t exist in international law.”