Concern grows as the hours pass over the fate of Alexey Navalny, the most prominent Russian opponent hostile to the Moscow government – and in prison with a 19 year sentence -, who literally “disappeared” causing fear for his safety. In fact, the lawyers have not been able to speak to us for days and the thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side has not been in contact with his staff for a week.
This is a particularly worrying element in the days in which the dissident network launched the campaign to boycott the March elections and the obvious victory of the Tsar. “Alexey has been missing for three days,” reported the head of the investigative department of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, Maria Pevchikh, late on Friday evening. «The lawyers stood all day in front of IK-6, his current penitentiary, and IK-7, a special regime colony in the Vladimir region. Everywhere they were told to wait and in the end they were denied entry.” That morning Navalny was supposed to appear in court via the usual video link, but everything was officially canceled due to problems with the penitentiary’s electricity network which are still unresolved to date. But it’s not just this: «We learned that Alexey had a serious health problem, his life is in danger», Pevchikh denounced again. «Last week he felt unwell in his cell, he felt dizzy and lay down on the floor. The staff intervened by giving him an IV. We don’t know what he was, but since he is not given food, he is kept in an isolation cell without ventilation, it seems that he fainted from hunger ». In the days following the dissident’s collapse everything seemed to proceed normally, «the lawyers saw him, he felt well. But now it’s the third day that we don’t know where he is. And there were no letters from him all week”, the manager continues. An important week, marked first by the launch of the anti-Putin campaign, then by the president’s confirmation of his re-nomination. The opponent’s network, in prison for almost three years, launched the “Russia without Putin” initiative just last Thursday. The organizers ask every citizen to “convince at least ten people to vote against Putin”. “The results of the vote they will be falsified, but our task is to show everyone that Russia no longer needs Putin – reads the appeal -. The 2024 elections will be a referendum for the approval of his actions, for the approval of the war”. The link to the campaign website would also have been incorporated into the QR code printed on some apparently innocuous billboards, with the words “Russia, happy new year”. Posters actually appeared in several Russian cities. So much so that, reports Nexta – the linked media to the Belarusian opposition -, the Moscow authorities would have banned them.