He Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny imprisoned He assured today on social networks that he is fine, in his first words from his new prison in the Arctic Circle, where he reappeared on Monday after missing for almost three weeks. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I’m very happy to have reached my destination,” he says in a letter posted on his Telegram channel.
Navalny revealed that he arrived on Saturday at IK-3 penitentiary of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug after 20 days of sailing from Moscow to the town of Jarp with stops in several cities, including the capital of the Urals, Yekaterinburg, and Vorkuta, home of one of the most feared soviet gulag. He admitted that the move was “quite exhausting,” but added that his mood is, “anyway, excellent.”
“I didn’t expect anyone to find me until mid-January. That’s why I was so surprised when in the afternoon the door opened with the words: ‘Your lawyer has come.’ He said you had lost sight of me and some even got worried. for me. Thanks for the support!“he explained.
Far from all civilization
Navalny He stressed that the prison is located within the Arctic Circle and that when he looks out the window of his cell “at first it is night, then afternoon comes and night again.” The opposition’s lawyers, who located his client the day before, had not contacted him since last December 5, which alerted his co-religionists and the Western chancelleries.
The town of Jarp, which has about 6,000 inhabitants, is located almost 2,000 kilometers from Moscow or about 45 hours by train from the Russian capital. Jarp is less than 50 kilometers from Salekhardthe administrative capital of this territory that has an area larger than that of France, but is populated by only half a million inhabitants.
According to one of his collaborators in exile, Iván Zhdanov, the prison is named after ‘Polar wolf’considered one of the most distant prisons from civilization in all of Russia and that it was built on the basis of a gulag.
“Escape is practically impossible. On the one hand, hundreds of kilometers of tundra, on the other, the mountains of the Arctic Ural. That is why they lock up the most terrible criminals and serial killers there,” commented Ivan Vostrikov, a contributor to the opponent in the Siberian region of Tyumen, on social networks.
One of the main directors of the expropriated Yukos oil company, Plato Lébedevserved part of his sentence in said prison, which is located in an area of permafrost.
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Ten days ago, the Russian penitentiary services (FSIN) admitted that Navalny had been transferred from the prison where he was serving his sentence in the Vladimir region “by virtue of the ruling issued by the Moscow Urban Court on August 4”, which included a new sentence of 19 years for extremism.
Navalnythat He serves almost 30 years in prison for various crimes, he was transferred after announcing a campaign against the re-election in 2024 of the President Vladimir Putinin power since 2000.