Alexei Navalny can't be found:
Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is missing after being abruptly transferred out of his prison colony to an unknown location, a top aide said Tuesday.
“Where Alexei is now, and which colony he is being taken to, we don’t know,” Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, said in a statement on Telegram.
Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic, had most recently been in custody at Correctional Colony No. 2, a prison camp in Pokrov, 74 miles east of Moscow.
But when Navalny’s lawyer arrived to visit him Tuesday, he was told, “There is no such convict here,” his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh wrote on Twitter.
The Russian government has been making an example out of him to make other dissidents think twice about getting uppity for years. There were the trumped-up embezzlement charges against him and his brother in 2014, leading to his brother being jailed and Alexei being put on house arrest. There was the 2020 poisoning, which led to his current chain of troubles. He was taken to Germany to have the poisoning treated. Upon return to Russia, he was detained for parole violation for having been in Germany. He's been lingering in prison since early 2021, and authorities have menaced him with sleep deprivation and let a number of health issues go untreated.
He has the kind of steely courage that is a rare commodity in this world.
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