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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
He has since been handed three prison terms and spent months in isolation in a penal colony in the Vladimir region east of Moscow for alleged minor infractions.
Mr Navalny’s aide, Lyubov Sobol, said last week that she feared the relocation to a special security penal colony was linked to the start of Putin’s presidential election campaign.
Bill Browder, a US financier who was formerly the largest foreign investor in Russia before being banned from re-entering the country by Putin, said the news of Mr Navalny’s disappearance was “alarming and disturbing”.
The Russian autocrat announced his widely expected decision to run after a stage-managed Kremlin awards ceremony, where war veterans pleaded with him to seek re-election.
Igor Girkin, an ultranationalist who had recently been critical of Putin and who had stated his intention to run for the presidency before being arrested, also had his pre-trial detention extended by six months on Thursday.
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