Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been moved to the IK-2 penal colony in the Vladimir region to serve his two-and-a-half year sentence, his Instagram account confirmed Monday.
Navalny’s whereabouts had been unknown since Friday, when his team said he was moved from a pre-trial detention center outside Moscow where he was being quarantined. Reports citing prison and law enforcement sources said he was transferred to IK-2, a prison camp in the town of Pokrov notorious for psychological isolation and harsh conditions.
In an Instagram post, Navalny said he had been moved to IK-2, calling it “a real concentration camp 100 kilometers from Moscow.”
“I think someone upstairs read Orwell’s ‘1984’ and said, ‘Yeah, cool. Let’s do this. Education through dehumanization.’ But if you treat everything with humor, then you can live. So, overall, I’m doing well,” he wrote alongside an old photo of himself with a close-cropped haircut.
Earlier, the state-run TASS news agency reported that a military garrison court notified the head of IK-2 that it will consider Tuesday a complaint from Navalny’s lawyers regarding Russian investigators’ inaction toward his August poisoning in Siberia.
The notification, dated March 1, asks the colony’s administration to ensure Navalny’s participation in the court session via video link.
European scientists and the global chemical weapons watchdog determined that Navalny was poisoned with a new variant of Novichok when he fell ill on a domestic flight in August 2020. Navalny spent months recovering in Germany and was jailed upon his return to Russia in January for violating his probation while abroad.
Russia has refused to open a criminal probe into Navalny’s poisoning despite pressure from the West.
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