FIERCE Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was found in a horror Siberian prison on Christmas Day after he vanished 20 days ago.
The jailed opposition leader, 47, was finally tracked down in a hellhole Siberian “Polar Wolf” jail allegedly known for torturing and beating prisoners.
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Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s number one enemy, has spoken out for the first time since his disappearance.
He said on Tuesday he is “fine” but had endured a “pretty exhausting” transfer to the freezing and remote colony beyond the Arctic Circle.
Navalny, who suffered a serious health problem in jail before disappearing, was tracked down to the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp, about 1,200 miles north east of Moscow
A former inmate of the hellish gulag said beatings are rife soon after the prisoners enter the jail and are “impossible to dodge”.
They are beaten with batons, choked, pepper-sprayed, tied up, forced into awkward positions, and subjected to “humiliating procedures”, he said.
The colony staff explained that inmates are – illegally – beaten because “the prisoner must understand from the first minutes where he ended up”, but then the torture continues.
Navalny miraculously managed to make light of the terrifying transfer on Tuesday.
He wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I’m totally relieved that I’ve finally made it.”
“I’m still in a good mood, as befits a Santa Claus,” he said as he joked about his winter clothing and beard.
His spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh revealed on Tuesday: “We have found Alexei Navalny.
“He is now in IK-3 in the settlement of Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District. His lawyer visited him today.
“Alexei is doing well.”
The district of Kharp, home to about 5,000 people, is located above the Arctic Circle.
It is “one of the most northern and remote colonies,” Ivan Zhdanov, who manages Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said.
He described conditions as “harsh” – with very little contact to the outside world.
The jail is also known to locals as “the end of the world”.
“From the very beginning, it was clear that authorities wanted to isolate Alexei, especially before the elections,” Zhdanov said.
Zhdanov said Navalny’s supporters sent 618 requests for information about the location of the political leader – who had previously been held at a hellish gulag 145 miles east of Moscow.
Navalny’s supporters, who had been preparing for his potential transfer to a “special regime” colony – the harshest in Russia’s prison system – said he hadn’t been seen by his lawyers since December 6.
Ex-inmate Mikhail said that guards “hit you with all their might on the head, neck, back, wherever they can.
“It’s impossible to dodge, the line of guards is dense, and everyone is beating.”
All the prisoners from his section were “forced to undress and go out half naked into the cold.
“There they were sprayed with water from a fire hose.”
Another former inmate said: “For the slightest transgression, you are punished – they beat you, put you in an isolation ward.
“There is a room there, called a ‘bathhouse’.
“For example, if you refuse to sign Article 106 [under which prisoners can be forced to work without pay], they take you to this ‘bathhouse’ and undress you.
“There is a wooden bench there, they handcuff you to it and beat you until you sign…”
He said: “There is a road there, on both sides of which there is a cemetery.
“Read the word Kharp – [the village name] in reverse and you will understand what they turn people into.”
In Russian the word means “dust”.
“I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
Lawyer Vera Goncharova said the conditions are little different from notorious jail IK-18 – or Polar Owl, a jail for life-term inmates – located in the same village.
“It is the same as all colonies for ‘lifers’, where they walk around bent, bending their body 90 degrees, and they put a bag over their head when they take a prisoner out, so that he does not understand how the territory of the institution is built”
Inmates spend “almost all the time in their cells”, she said.
“It’s a very hard life, a very closed institution, maximum difficulties for a lawyer to access, maximum isolation.”
Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said: “They deliberately sent [Navalny] to this particular colony precisely in order to isolate Alexei as much as possible, so as not to give him any opportunity to communicate with the outside world.
“This is all happening precisely because Alexei, despite the fact that he is in prison, is still the main opponent of Vladimir Putin.
“It is not surprising that they began to transfer him to another colony right now, so that he could not interfere with Putin’s campaign [for the March presidential election].”
Navalny continued to joke about the icy new prison he’d been moved to: “I have a sheepskin coat, a hat with earflaps, soon they will give me felt boots, and after a 20-day [rail] journey, I have grown a beard.
“I don’t say ‘Ho-ho-ho’, but ‘Oh-oh-oh’, when I look outside the window, where first it’s night, then evening, then night again.
“I can’t entertain you with stories about polar exoticism yet, because I haven’t seen anything except a camera.
“And outside the cell window you can only see a fence standing close.”
Navalny, a vocal activist and a defiant critic of Putin’s regime – has been described as the man the Russian president “fears most” by the Washington Post.
He was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in a 2020 attack allegedly ordered by the Kremlin and later jailed in trials slammed by Amnesty International.
His most recent sentence in 2022 replaced an earlier one, condemning him to serve around seven years in a more remote “strict regime penal colony”.
Previously, Navalny claimed Putin had been desperate to silence him after he and his team published a list of 200 oligarchs accused of being “directly responsible for the aggressive war launched against Ukraine”.
The list of 200 names was part of a wider “List of 6,000” Putin accomplices and Russian war enablers that angered the state leaders.
A video interview earlier this year with him revealed he suffered from mystery stomach aches and seizures – and had lost 18lbs in less than a month, sparking fears of a slow poisoning.
Most of his time in jail has reportedly been served in isolation.
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