<\/p>\n
Jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny has been tracked down to a penal colony north of the Arctic Circle, his spokeswoman said on Monday, after supporters lost touch with him<\/a> for more than two weeks.<\/p>\n Navalny was tracked down to the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region, about 1,900 kilometres northeast of Moscow, spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said. Navalny\u2019s lawyer managed to see him on Monday, Yarmysh said.<\/p>\n \u201cThis prison will be much worse than the one that was before,\u201d Yarmysh told Reuters TV<\/em> in Vilnius via video call. \u201cThey are trying to make his life as unbearable as it possibly can be.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey definitely try to isolate Alexei and to make it more difficult to access him,\u201d said Yarmysh, who refused to disclose her location due to security concerns.<\/p>\n Navalny\u2019s allies, who had been preparing for his expected transfer to a \u201cspecial regime\u201d colony, the harshest grade in Russia\u2019s prison system, said he had not been seen by his lawyers since December 6 and raised the alarm about his fate.<\/p>\n Navalny\u2019s new home, known as \u201cthe Polar Wolf\u201d colony, is considered to be one of the toughest prisons in Russia. Most prisoners there have been convicted of grave crimes. Winters are harsh and temperatures are due to drop to around minus 28 degrees Celsius there over the next week.<\/p>\n About 60km north of the Arctic Circle, the prison was founded in the 1960s as part of what was once the GULAG system of forced Soviet labour camps, according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.<\/p>\n \u201cThe conditions there are harsh, with a special regime in the permafrost,\u201d said Leonid Volkov, an aide to Navalny. He said it was difficult to communicate with prisoners held at the remote site.<\/p>\n Navalny\u2019s lawyer Ivan Zhdanov said supporters of the 47-year-old had sent 618 requests for information about his location and suggested that the Russian authorities wanted to isolate Navalny ahead of the March presidential election.<\/p>\n Navalny, who had been held at a penal colony 235km east of Moscow, says he has been imprisoned because he is viewed as a threat by the Russian political elite. As a prisoner, he is unable to run in the election.<\/p>\n He denies all the charges he has been convicted of and casts Russia\u2019s judicial system as deeply corrupt. Russia says he is a convicted criminal.<\/p>\n Navalny earned admiration from Russia\u2019s disparate opposition for voluntarily returning<\/a> to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he had been treated for what Western laboratory tests showed was an attempt to poison him with a nerve agent.<\/p>\n\u2018Polar Wolf\u2019<\/h2>\n