The mysterious prison disappearance of Putin’s most powerful opponent

Russia’s best-known opposition figure Alexei Navalny has gone missing, from the one place you would have thought no one could go missing: a high-security Russian prison camp.

The alarm was sounded by his lawyers, who said they had been told that Navalny was no longer listed at the penal colony north of Moscow, but were not informed of his whereabouts. Amnesty International has designated Navalny a prisoner of conscience and called on the Russian authorities to “disclose his fate and whereabouts immediately”.

The most prosaic explanation for Navalny’s disappearance is that he is in the process of being transferred to another camp. In August, he was sentenced to an additional 19 years for offences, including “inciting and financing extremism”, which his supporters see as politically motivated.

By the start of this month, however, he had not been moved and was in the course of challenging allegations that he had breached prison rules. He had been due to have his objections heard by a judge via video link, but this did not happen, supposedly for technical reasons – the connection did not work.

If he is being transferred to a different – in all probability, harsher – prison camp, this could explain the week’s lack of news. These can be long journeys to remote places, often in cattle trucks. It is winter, and parts of Russia have experienced record early snowfalls. It is entirely possible that his wife and his lawyers will be notified once he has arrived.

Silence as to the date of a prisoner’s transfer, destination or whereabouts en route, would not of themselves be unusual. But these are not usual times; Russia is at war with Ukraine. Vladimir Putin has just confirmed that he will indeed stand for re-election as president next spring. And Navalny is not your average Russian prisoner.

He is one of the few individuals seen by Russia’s president as so problematic that he avoids ever mentioning him by name. All these are reasons to fear that Navalny’s disappearance may bode worse than a routine prison transfer.

Even at best, Russian prison regimes are harsh, and Navalny, who is now 47, was singled out from the start for especially tough treatment, including long spells of solitary confinement. There have been reports in recent months that his health was failing – reports that are particularly disturbing, given Navalny’s apparent fitness when he returned from Germany in January, 2021.

Clearly, given the fate of other opposition activists – chief among them, Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down only yards from the Kremlin in 2015 – and Putin’s well-known personal animus towards Navalny, it would be wise to rule nothing out.

Navalny was, after all, the subject of what was widely presumed to be an assassination attempt – by poisoning – during a 2020 electoral campaign trip around Siberia. That he survived is credited to the pilot of the plane he was on when taken ill, and to doctors in Omsk, who gave him the necessary treatment.

He was then flown to Germany, after a plea from then chancellor, Angela Merkel, where he spent time in hospital and regaining his health. His decision to return to Russia was considered both brave and foolhardy, given the certainty that he would face further charges.

On arrival – to an airport different from the one scheduled to evade waiting supporters – he was immediately detained and has been in custody of some sort ever since. It is not hard to believe that the Kremlin would have preferred him to remain in exile abroad.

How much of a threat Navalny might pose to the power of Putin in a free election is hard to gauge. The only time he was permitted to stand for office – for mayor of Moscow in 2013 – he took 27 per cent of the vote, which was seen as a surprisingly strong showing, but a long way short of the 51 per cent attributed to the Kremlin-favoured incumbent.

Though Navalny challenged the figures, and it is not hard to suspect an official attempt to pre-empt any run-off, there was no suggestion at the time that Navalny was cheated of victory. That election can, however, be seen as marking the start of Navalny’s problems with the law.

Ten years on, the war on Ukraine has provided the Kremlin with a pretext for taking the suppression of opposition activity to a new level – hence perhaps the new charges brought against Navalny earlier this year.

The crackdown has affected activists involved in Navalny’s extensive network across Russia, which has been effectively broken up, if not destroyed, but also a number of veteran Soviet-era dissidents, who have been detained and convicted.

Navalny’s success as an opposition campaigner reflected in part his pioneering use of the internet and social media, which appealed to a new generation of Russians, and his ability to harness local concerns, especially about corruption, to a national cause.

A two-hour film, made while he was in Germany and released shortly after his return to Russia, targeted the Kremlin directly, with claims that a luxurious palace was being built secretly for Putin in the southern, Krasnodar region of Russia.

While this may have riled the Kremlin – and the claims have not been substantiated – it is hard to understand why Putin apparently sees Navalny as such a threat as to warrant the prison terms that have been handed down. Except perhaps in one respect: the risk posed by elections, and the toppling of leaders in Georgia and Ukraine in the so-called “colour” revolutions.

Putin has made no secret of his belief that the Orange revolution of 2004-5 and still more the Euromaidan uprising of 2014 – that toppled Viktor Yanukovych and preceded Russia’s annexation of Crimea – were instigated by the West, and that the US intended Russia to be next.

Mention by some US officials in the months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that an objective was to weaken Russia and that Putin was not fit to be president only reinforced that conviction. And Navalny, as the only opposition figure with a national network, might perhaps be seen as a sleeping giant, biding his time.

In the absence of any clarification about Navalny’s whereabouts, the most plausible explanation remains the most banal: a transfer to a still harsher, more remote, penal establishment.

Were some disaster to have befallen him – by accident or design, there would seem little advantage to the Kremlin in delaying the news. It would be a colossal embarrassment, but given the state of relations between Putin and the West since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia would have little to lose by coming clean.

Until such time as either of the more likely explanations is confirmed – a routine transfer, or the worst possible outcome – it might be worth hazarding the slenderest of chances that something else might be in play.

There are signs that the war in Ukraine could be at a turning point. US public and political support is in decline. There are signs of disunity in Kyiv, with one-time hero, Volodymyr Zelensky, facing open criticism from two big forces – the commander of the armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, and the mayor of Kyiv, former heavy-weight boxing champion, Vitali Klitschko.

Were US support to flag, there is no way that the EU plus the UK could make up the gap. With Ukraine still intent on recovering all its territory occupied since 2014, and Russia insisting, as it has long done, that it will not talk on Ukraine’s terms, there seems little prospect of talks.

Then again, might there be movement of some sort behind the scenes? The outlines perhaps of a grand bargain that would place on the table the complex of grievances that exist on the Western, Ukrainian and Russian sides?

And could those possibly include, along with a ceasefire in Ukraine, the fate of Alexei Navalny and the Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich – to name the two most prominent current hostages of the Kremlin – as well as a possible review of Western sanctions against Russia?

Impossible, you might say, as I might, too. But sometimes, just sometimes, it is worth thinking the unthinkable, and even if, as is likely, there is no grand bargain at hand, maybe there could be.

That would presuppose, however, that Alexei Navalny is alive and in transit – which at the time of writing, cannot be guaranteed.