Kremlin critic Navalny moved from prison, taken to unknown location
FILE In this file photo made from video provided by the Moscow City Court on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny makes a heart gesture standing in a cage during a hearing to a motion from the Russian prison service to convert the suspended sentence of Navalny from the 2014 criminal conviction into a real prison term in the Moscow City Court in Moscow, Russia. When the team of jailed Russia opposition leader Alexei Navalny announced a protest in a new format, urging people to come out to their residential courtyards on Sunday and shine their cellphone flashlights, many responded with jokes and skepticism. (Moscow City Court via AP, File)
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MOSCOW (NewsNation Now) — Kremlin critic Alexi Navalny has been moved from a Russian detention facility and taken to an unknown location, his lawyers said Friday.
Vadim Kobzev, one of Navalny’s lawyers, said he had visited his client on Thursday, but that another lawyer had tried to see him on Friday only to be told that Navalny had been moved somewhere else.
“The prison said he wasn’t there and that’s it,” Kobzev told Reuters, adding that Navalny was in good health when he had visited him a day earlier at the Vladimir region jail.
Citing laws on protecting personal information, a spokeswoman for the Federal Penitentiary Service said she could not disclose information on Navalny’s whereabouts.
Navalny, one of President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critics, was arrested in Moscow in January when he was returning from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian authorities have rejected the accusation.
Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.
In February, a court sentenced Navalny to two years and eight months in prison for violating the terms of his probation while recuperating in Germany. The sentence stems from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Navalny has rejected as fabricated.
Navalny’s arrest and imprisonment have fueled a huge wave of protests across Russia. Authorities responded with a sweeping crackdown, detaining thousands of people, many of whom were fined or given jail terms ranging from seven to 15 days.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on seven Russian officials over the poisioning and jailing of Navalny.
Among those blacklisted by the Treasury were Andrei Yarin, the chief of the Kremlin’s domestic policy directorate; Alexander Bortnikov, the Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB); and deputy ministers of defense Alexei Krivoruchko and Pavel Popov, among others, according to a statement.
The Biden administration also announced sanctions under the U.S. Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act for 14 businesses and another enterprise, most of which it said were involved in the production of biological and chemical agents.
The European Union also imposed sanctions on four senior Russian officials over Navalny’s jailing.
The 27-nation bloc imposed bans on travel and froze the assets in Europe of Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Igor Krasnov, the prosecutor general, Viktor Zolotov, head of the National Guard, and Alexander Kalashnikov, head of the Federal Prison Service.