Russian Activist Was Disappeared—to an Arctic Military Base

A Russian anti-corruption activist had the door of his Moscow home smashed in, his electricity cut, his SIM card seized, and was taken into custody by local authorities Monday night. By late Tuesday, according to his colleagues, the activist Ruslan Shaveddinov had surfaced—in a remote Arctic Ocean military base more than a thousand miles from Moscow. Alexei Navalny, founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation where Shaveddinov worked, called it a kidnapping. While military service is mandatory in Russia, Navalny tweeted that it had now “turned into a mechanism of imprisonment… Just a way to deprive people of freedom.”