On Friday, March 12, Alexey Navalny’s lawyers reported that the opposition politician had been moved from the detention center in Kolchugino (Vladimir region), where he had been in custody since late February. Navalny’s whereabouts remain unknown at the time of this writing.
Navalny’s transfer was announced in a post on his personal Twitter account:
“Alexey’s lawyers have been at SIZO-3 in Kolchugino since the beginning of the work day. Under various pretexts, they weren’t allowed to visit Alexey […] Only at 14:00 were they informed that Alexey had left. Where to — They [prison officials] refused to answer.”
“His location is unknown to us once again,” Navalny’s lawyer Olga Mikhailova told Ekho Moskvy. “The administration is supposed to notify his relatives of where he has been transferred. But as practice has shown, this isn’t being done.”
Update. Citing an unnamed source in law enforcement, the state news agency TASS has reported that Alexey Navalny was moved to Penal Colony No. 2 in Pokrov (Vladimir region), where he will serve out his 2.5-year sentence. However, Navalny’s lawyer Olga Mikhailova said that the prison staff could neither confirm nor deny that he had been transferred there.
In February, a Russian court revoked Alexey Navalny’s probation in the Yves Rocher case and incarcerated him under a reinstated sentence. He will now spend two years and six months in prison, taking into account time previously served in pre-trial detention and under house arrest.
On February 25, Navalny was moved from Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina remand prison. His whereabouts remained unknown until March 3, when his lawyers confirmed that he was in custody at Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 3 in Kolchugino. A source told the state news agency TASS that Navalny was sent to Kolchugino “for quarantine before being sent to IK-2 [Penal Colony No. 2] in Pokrov.”
Earlier, a number of media outlets reported that Navalny had already been sent to Pokrov’s Penal Colony No. 2. A source close to the Vladimir region’s administration told the business newspaper Vedomosti that this prison is the final destination listed in Navalny’s personal file.
