Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny located in a penal colony near the Arctic Circle

A spokeswoman for Alexei Navalny says he is in a prison colony about 1900km northeast of Moscow. Photo / AP

Associates of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said yesterday he has been located at a prison colony above the Arctic Circle, almost three weeks after contact with him was lost.

Navalny, the most prominent foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism. He had been imprisoned in the Vladimir region of central Russia about 230km east of Moscow, but his lawyers said they had not been able to reach him since December 6.

His spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said he was in a prison colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region, about 1900km northeast of Moscow.

Navalny is “fine — at least as much as possible after such a long stage”, and a lawyer had visited him, Yarmysh said.

The region is notorious for long and severe winters. The town is about 100km from Vorkuta, whose coal mines were among the harshest of the Soviet gulag prison-camp system.

“It is almost impossible to get to this colony; it is almost impossible to even send letters there. This is the highest possible level of isolation from the world,” Navalny’s chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, said on X.

Transfers within Russia’s prison system are shrouded in secrecy and inmates can disappear from contact for several weeks. Navalny’s team was particularly alarmed when he could not be found because he had been ill and reportedly was being denied food and kept in an unventilated cell.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, pictured in 2020, is serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism. Photo / AP

Yarmysh said the transfer was connected with the campaign for the Russian presidential election in March. While Putin’s re-election is all but certain given his overwhelming control over the country’s political scene and a widening crackdown on dissent, Navalny’s supporters and other critics hope to use the campaign to erode public support for the Kremlin leader and his military action in Ukraine.

“They deliberately sent him to this particular colony precisely in order to isolate Alexei as much as possible, so as not to give him any opportunity to communicate with the outside world,” she said. “This is all happening precisely because Alexei, despite the fact that he is in prison, is still the main opponent of Vladimir Putin ... It is not surprising that they began to transfer him to another colony right now, so that he could not interfere with Putin’s campaign.”

Navalny has been behind bars in Russia since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Before his arrest, he campaigned against official corruption and organised major anti-Kremlin protests.

He has since received three prison terms and spent months in isolation in Penal Colony No 6 for alleged minor infractions. He has rejected all charges against him as politically motivated.