Jailed Russian opposition leader Navalny ‘relieved’ after ‘exhausting’ 20-day prison transfer

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny has spoken out for the first time since his sudden disappearance several weeks ago, after his team said they eventually located him at a penal colony in Siberia Monday.

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny has spoken out for the first time since his sudden disappearance several weeks ago, after his team said they eventually located him at a penal colony in Siberia Monday. Navalny, a staunch Kremlin critic, shared a message via his aides on social media on Tuesday, expressing “relief” after surviving what he said was a 20-day prison transfer that covered thousands of miles. “They brought me here on Saturday night. And I was transported with such precaution and on such a strange route (Vladimir - Moscow - Chelyabinsk - Ekaterinburg - Kirov - Vorkuta - Kharp) that I didn’t expect anyone to find me here before mid-January,” Navalny wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “The 20 days of my transportation were pretty exhausting, but I’m still in a good mood, as befits a Santa Claus,” he said, adding that he is fine and “totally relieved” that he finally finished the trip. According to CNN’s calculations, Navalny covered more than 3,700 miles (about 6,000 kilometers) in the 20 days his journey took, an average of 185 miles a day. Navalny had been imprisoned in a penal colony about 150 miles east of Moscow – until his lawyers revealed that on December 11 they had lost contact with him. An intensive search effort followed – and on Monday they announced they’d located Navalny in the IK-3 prison colony in the village of Kharp, about 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region.