At least five Russian political prisoners have been transferred from prisons and prison colonies in recent days, a coordinated move that has fueled speculation of a possible prisoner exchange.
Russia has sentenced dozens of people to long-term prison terms for opposing the Kremlin and Moscow’s military offensive against Ukraine.
Prison transfer conditions in Russia are notoriously murky, with families and lawyers given no detailed information and prisoners often losing contact with the outside world for weeks.
But this usually happens after a conviction or a lost appeal, and the disappearance of several high-profile political prisoners at once is extremely rare.
“Apparently, we are on the verge of a very large-scale exchange,” Russian political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya said on Telegram on Tuesday.
Lawyers for jailed opposition politician Ilya Yashin said on Tuesday he had been moved from his penal colony in the western region of Smolensk, where he was serving an eight-and-a-half year sentence for violating Russia’s military censorship laws.
“Ilya Yashin was sent from the colony to an unknown location,” said his Telegram channel, which is run by his lawyers and supporters.
Two associates of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny – Lilia Chanysheva and Ksenia Fadeyeva – also disappeared from their prison colonies in recent days.
He ran the regional headquarters for Navalny and was sentenced on charges of “extremism.”
Chanysheva’s husband told X that she had been transferred from a prison in Siberia on July 26.
In Fadeyeva’s case, Novosibirsk prison authorities “refused to answer her lawyer’s questions about where, when she was taken and what this was connected with”, her colleagues wrote on Telegram on Monday.
Supporters of artist Alexandra Skochilenko also said she had been transferred from a prison in St Petersburg. Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years in prison for painting messages opposing the Ukraine invasion on supermarket price tags.
And human rights activist Oleg Orlov, a prominent figure in the Nobel Laureate Memorial group, was similarly moved from a detention center, his lawyers said on Monday.
Memorial said in a social media post that he was still challenging the two-and-a-half-year sentence he was given for “defaming” the Russian military.
Both the United States and Moscow have said they are actively discussing the exchange of American journalist Ivan Gershkovitch – who earlier this month was sentenced to 16 years in prison on espionage charges in a fast-track trial that his employer and the White House dismissed as a “sham”.
After Navalny’s death in an Arctic prison colony in February, President Vladimir Putin said he had given the approval for talks on releasing him under a deal with the West.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
