Two former leaders of the late Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s teams in Ufa and Tomsk, Lilia Chanysheva and Ksenia Fadeyeva, have been transferred from the prisons where they were being held and their current whereabouts are not known.
Chanysheva was transferred from correctional colony No. 28 in the Perm region to an unknown facility without her relatives being informed.
Chanysheva's husband, Almaz Gatin, wrote on X on July 29 that when he arrived at the prison the day before to deliver a package for his wife, officials told him she had been transferred to another facility on July 27 but refused to say where and why Chanysheva was transferred.
"I ask all for help to find my spouse: Please let me know if you know anything about Chanysheva's whereabouts," Gatin wrote.
A lawyer for Fadeyeva is quoted by Mediazona as saying his client had been removed from correctional colony No. 9 in the Novosibirsk region and that prison officials refused to answer questions about where, why, and when she was transferred.
Ksenia Fadeyeva in Tomsk in 2020
Fadeyeva was sentenced in December to nine years in prison by a court in Tomsk after being found guilty of organizing the activities of an extremist community. She was also stripped of her mandate as a deputy in the Tomsk City Duma.
Chanysheva was initially sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison in June 2023 after a court in Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan, also found her guilty of creating an extremist community, inciting extremism, and establishing an organization that violates citizens' rights.
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In April, the Supreme Court of Bashkortostan extended Chanysheva's prison sentence by two years after an appeal by prosecutors who said her initial sentence for extremism was too lenient.
Chanysheva headed the local unit of Navalny's network of regional campaign groups until his team disbanded after a Moscow prosecutor went to court to have them branded "extremist" in 2021.
The label effectively outlawed the group.
Chanysheva's defense team have said the charges appeared to be retroactive to the period of time before the organization she worked for had been legally classified as extremist.
Navalny died on February 16 in an Arctic prison while serving a 19-year term on extremism and other charges he and his supporters said were trumped up and politically motivated.
Several opposition leaders and associates of Navalny have since been charged with establishing an extremist group.
Since Russia launched its full-scale unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, several of Navalny's former associates have been charged with discrediting the Russian armed forces, distributing "false" news about the military, and extremism.
The former leader of Navalny’s team in the Altai region, Vadim Ostanin, was sentenced last year to nine years in prison on an extremism charge.
It became known in May that Chanysheva officially asked President Vladimir Putin for clemency.