After supporters were unable to find him for nearly three weeks, dissident Russian political leader Alexei Navalny, who has survived a polonium poisoning attempt, has been located at a former Soviet gulag facility 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Reuters reports.
The 47-year-old opposition leader was moved from a prison about 145 east of Moscow to the K-3 penal colony in Kharp, about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow, a “special regime” camp where Putin’s most dangerous opponents and most dangerous prisoners. Navalny was originally sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison on trumped up financial fraud charges; in 2022, he had another nine year sentence added to his sentence for the same case, and in August 2023, a Russian court sentenced him to an additional 19 years on “extremism” charges.
Conditions at the camp, known as “Polar Wolf,” are crowded beyond the two-square-meters of living space per prisoner mandated by Russian law. Temperatures at the camp will reach -28 degrees Celsius in winter.