Alexei Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader, is missing in the gulag

Editor’s note (December 18th 2023): This piece was updated after Russian courts suspended hearings at which Mr Navalny was due to appear.

The last time the world heard from Alexei Navalny was on December 7th, when Russia’s most important opposition leader, who has been sentenced to 19 years in jail on various trumped-up charges (a term which could be extended to 30 years on new terrorism charges), announced a campaign to discredit Vladimir Putin’s re-election as president. On that day, a post from Mr Navalny appeared on X (formerly Twitter): “The presidential elections will take place on March 17, 2024…We encourage everyone to use the 100 days before the vote to fight against Putin and his power.”

At the same time, Mr Navalny’s allies put up a website called “Russia Without Putin”. The purpose was not to influence the electoral result, it said; Mr Putin’s re-election is a foregone conclusion. Rather, it was to expose its hollowness: “The result will be rigged. Our task is to make it obvious to everyone that Russia does not need Putin.” As ever, Mr Navalny showed that he is able to make an impact even from behind bars. Barred from fighting for Russians’ votes, he is fighting for their minds, hoping to turn them against the war and Mr Putin.

The next day, on December 8th, Mr Putin confirmed that he would run in the 2024 elections. The announcement was quietly inserted into a comment made by Mr Putin at a Kremlin reception, in response to a staged plea from a former military commander in Ukraine’s Donbas region. The goal was to limit attention to Mr Putin’s campaign rather than to highlight it, said Ekaterina Schulmann, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre, a think-tank in Berlin. The Kremlin does not fear opposition politicians; they are all dead, in exile or in prison. Rather, it worries about popular doubt over the legitimacy of Mr Putin’s re-election.

Mr Navalny’s goal is to fan those doubts. He wanted to make sure, he said in his post, that on election day “no one cares about the falsified result, but that all of Russia has seen and understood” that it was faked. The Kremlin, as usual, took Mr Navalny’s threat seriously, and has made him disappear, from public view at least.

In October several of Mr Navalny’s lawyers, who carry his messages to the outside world, were harassed and jailed. On December 11th lawyers who had replaced them were told that Mr Navalny was no longer in his most recently known prison, Penal Colony No. 6, east of Moscow. The authorities have not told them where he has been taken. Mr Navalny has been kept in conditions amounting to torture since his arrest in 2021, and has been awaiting a transfer to an even harsher jail for months. But the timing of his disappearance was almost certainly co-ordinated with Mr Putin’s pre-election operation.

In the past several days Mr Navalny’s lawyers have desperately tried to locate him within Russia’s vast gulag system, contacting 200 prisons. On December 18th Russian courts suspended hearings where Mr Navalny was supposed to appear (whether by video link or in person) until his “whereabouts” could be “established”, his lawyers said. For prisoners, the period when they are in transfer between prisons is particularly dangerous; it is de facto impossible to hold anyone accountable for their life and safety. Mr Navalny has never before gone missing for more than a few days. If Mr Navalny’s lawyers and family cannot locate him, nothing stops the Kremlin from turning days into weeks. On social media the question “Where is Navalny?” is more and more prominent.

Mr Navalny is not the only political prisoner who has gone missing in recent days. Alexei Gorinov, a former Moscow municipal deputy, who has been sentenced to seven years for speaking out against the war and whose health has deteriorated in prison, disappeared; he was seen by his lawyer in his penal colony on December 8th.

On December 14th Mr Putin staged his annual call-in press conference. Its main purpose was to demonstrate continuity and the lack of an alternative to his rule. The war, he said, will continue for as long as it takes to fulfil its goals. Meanwhile, in a rare daytime attack, a salvo of supersonic missiles struck Kyiv and other cities across Ukraine. But other news suggested that Mr Putin’s goals are not close to being achieved: while Russia was showering Ukraine with rockets, EU leaders agreed to start accession talks with Ukraine. (It was Ukraine’s aspiration to move closer to the EU that triggered the overthrow of a Russia-backed government in 2014, which was followed by the Kremlin’s first attack on the country.)

The Russian president did not say how many hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian lives have been consumed by his war, but some figures he used inadvertently hinted at it. By September 2022, he said, 318,000 people had been mobilised; this year another 480,000 have been signed up. Russian and foreign sources agree that some 150,000 were deployed at the start of the invasion. And Mr Putin also said that at present some 615,000 troops are directly involved in the fighting. The figures suggest that well over 300,000 have been killed or wounded—a toll that corresponds to the latest American estimates.

Mr Putin said his war has already brought benefits: Russia’s economy is expected to grow by around 3.5% this year, and unemployment is at a record low. In his four-hour appearance, he said nothing about the presidential election. He did thank one supporter who said he had “been in power for as long as I remember”. But one question hung in the air without being asked: “Where is Navalny?” ■

Correction (15th December 2023): A previous version of this article misstated the length of Alexei Navalny’s prison sentence. Sorry.