Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny has been removed from the IK-6 penal colony in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow, and his current whereabouts are not known, his allies said on Monday.

Mr Navalny’s aides have been preparing for his possible transfer to a harsher regime colony after he was sentenced in August to an additional 19 years in prison.

Kira Yarmysh, Mr Navalny’s spokesman, said staff at the IK-6 colony in the town of Melekhovo had told his lawyer that the opposition leader was no longer among its inmates.

“Where they have taken him, they refuse to say,” she said on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

‘Cut off’ from the outside world

The process of transferring prisoners by rail across Russia’s vast territory can take weeks, with relatives and family unable to obtain information about their whereabouts and wellbeing until they reach their destination.

Mr Navalny’s lawyers have been unable to contact him since last Tuesday.

His aide Lyubov Sobol told Reuters last week that his supporters feared he was being transferred to a new penal colony, and that the timing was linked to the start of a presidential election campaign in which Vladimir Putin has said he will seek another six-year term.

“They are so afraid of Navalny, who is in prison, who has limited correspondence rights, can’t see his family and so on, that during the period when Putin would declare, they decided to just cut off Navalny as far as possible from the outside world. God forbid he should make some kind of statement,” she said.