Alexei Navany has not been seen since last Tuesday, three days before Vladimir Putin announced he would run for a fifth presidential term in Russia
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 think there were two choices: stay out of Russia and be dodging Putin assassination attempts the rest of his life, or return to Russia and hope his arrest and treatment spark real change/protest/revolt in Russia.
He gambled on the latter and it did not work out in his favor.
He could be feeding quotes to the news every single day and the western media would eat it like cereal. I believe he would have way more impact if he didn't gave up.
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.
Russia has spent the last 500 years bouncing around between malevolent autocrats. Hell, Kruschev was one of the more "sane" heads of state for which he was rewarded by being forced into "retirement."
The only way there will be a regime change is if the current regime is burned to the ground and then there's no guarantee that what comes next will be better. I'm not even sure what will happen when Putin finally kicks the bucket which will likely open a massive power vacuum.
There's a need for change but it would be naive to think that the path to it would be painless. It won't.
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.
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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