Russian President Vladimir Putin does not “monitor the fate” of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a senior Kremlin aide claimed after friends of the dissident announced his disappearance.
“We have neither the intention nor the ability to monitor the fate of prisoners and the process of their stay in their respective institutions,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday.
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Navalny has been out of contact with his attorneys and aides since Dec. 5, two days before he missed a virtual court appearance. His team now thinks that he has been transferred from the penal colony where he has been serving a sentence imposed by Russian authorities after his recovery from an assassination attempt linked to Putin’s FSB security agency,
“Prisoner transfers are dangerous primarily because, during this time, a person is deprived of all protection and assistance,” Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh told the Moscow Times. “In fact, he will be alone with people who have already tried to kill him once, and this of course makes this situation as dangerous as possible.”
Prison officials explained his absence from the court hearing last week by claiming that “there was no electricity in the [penal] colony” where he has been serving out a sentence imposed by Russian authorities after his recovery from an assassination attempt linked to Putin’s FSB security agency.
“The last time the lawyers saw Alexei was on 5 December,” Yarmysh told the Times of London. “Since 6 December no one has received any letters from him, and the letters written to him have not been delivered.”
The continued uncertainty about his whereabouts coincides with Putin’s announcement that he will seek a fifth term as president. He made that long-expected decision official on Friday, one day after the Russian parliament set a March date for the election. The Kremlin strongman’s victory is regarded as a formality, in part due to the pattern of assassination or imprisonment that has befallen his most popular opponents over the years, but Navalny’s associates hope to stoke a strong showing of anti-Putin votes nonetheless.
"Of course it's impossible to beat Putin in the 'elections'," said Leonid Volkov, another Navalny aide, in a Reuters interview. "Putin is vulnerable because he does not have answers today to the questions that really worry people. These are the questions of an exit strategy for the war — when and how it should end and when the soldiers will return home — and the questions of destitution, poverty, corruption, financial credits and all the rest.”
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Navalny’s team sees a relationship between his disappearance and their intent to conduct a “Russia without Putin” campaign over the coming months.
“They will try to hide him as long as possible,” Yarmysh told the Associated Press. “I guess this was made deliberately to isolate Alexei during this period of time so he wouldn’t be able to influence all these things in any way, because everyone understands — and Putin, of course, understands — that Alexei is his main rival, even despite the fact that he is not on the ballot.”