Jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny has been declared missing by his lawyers and allies just days after Vladimir Putin announced he would run for a fifth presidential term next year.
Mr Navalny, 47, who is serving a 19-year-term on charges of extremism, was due to appear in court on Monday via videolink but did not show up, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said.
His lawyers said they have not been able to contact him since last Tuesday and that his whereabouts are now unknown.
The Russian opposition figure has been behind bars since January 2021, when he returned from Germany having recovered from a nerve agent poisoning attempt that he blamed on the Kremlin.
I still don’t understand why he committed suicide-by-Putin.
Did he really have more influence as a martyr in prison than a free man in exile?
Puticide has become a real epidemic in Russia. There are calls for the government to do more to combat it but there has been little response even though data suggests a steady increase since Putin took office.
Ah so “missing” is a new term for gulag
I mean, the Kremlin tried to kill him with novochok a couple years ago. Maybe this time they just finished the job.
If you want ice scraped off the pavement in russia, just write Навальный [Naval’nyy] on it.
Can confirm, surprisingly effective.
Icy roads is a huge issue that often gets ignored or insufficiently addressed in Russia.
“missing”
They find him and it’ll obviously be a suicide like Gary Webb’s. Two shots to his head Two weeks before he exposed the CIA for smuggling Cocaine into the country in court. So yeah, he was probably ordering it off the Darknet to make it happen.