Lawyers for several high-profile prisoners being held in Russian correctional facilities have added their clients' names to a growing list of inmates whose whereabouts are unknown.
Olga Karlova, a lawyer for former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, who is serving a 16-year prison term on espionage charges that he and Washington reject, said on July 31 that she does not know her client's location and authorities at the prison in Russia's Mordovia where Whelan is incarcerated have ignored requests to confirm whether he is at the penitentiary.
Karlova added that she lost contact with her client several days ago and has asked the Public Monitoring Commission rights group to help locate him.
SEE ALSO: More Imprisoned Russian Dissidents Unexpectedly Transferred To Unknown LocationsJust hours after Whalen’s disappearance was made public, the lawyer of opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza said he was not allowed to enter correctional colony No. 6 in the Siberian city of Omsk to see his client, who last year was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison on treason and other charges he calls trumped up.
Vadim Prokhorov said he has no idea about Kara-Murza's exact whereabouts, while lawyers for journalist Maria Ponomarenko, who is serving a six-year prison term in Siberia over her public condemnation of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, said they too lost contact with their client.
In all, at least seven high-profile prisoners in Russia have reportedly disappeared and are thought to be being moved from the facilities where they were serving sentences. Though officials have not commented, the situation has sparked speculation that preparations may be under way for a prisoner swap with the West.
A day earlier, it became known that another opposition politician, Ilya Yashin, who is serving an 8 1/2-year prison term for his criticism of Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, had been unexpectedly transferred to an unknown location from correctional colony No. 3 in the western Smolensk region.
Yashin's lawyer, Tatyana Solomina, was cited by his supporters on Telegram as saying on July 30 that her client's current location was not known.
Others to have gone missing include Kevin Lik, a 19-year-old man from Russia's North Caucasus region of Adygea who was sentenced to four years in prison on a treason charge in December and unexpectedly transferred from a penitentiary in the northwestern region of Arkhangelsk.
SEE ALSO: Who Are The Americans Behind Bars In Russia?Earlier this week, relatives, supporters, and lawyers of four other imprisoned activists -- former chiefs of late opposition politician Aleksei Navalny's teams in Bashkortostan and Novosibirsk, Lilia Chanysheva and Ksenia Fadeyeva, veteran human rights defender Oleg Orlov, and anti-war artist Sasha Skochilenko -- said they had been also unexpectedly transferred from prisons or detention centers to other unspecified penitentiaries and kept incommunicado since then.
Only Skochilenko's supporters were informed that she was transferred to an unidentified penitentiary in Moscow. The destinations of the other three remain unknown.
Human rights groups have criticized Russian regulations with regard to the treatment of convicts, whose whereabouts can be kept under wraps during the period they are transferred from one penitentiary to another, a process known as "etap."
Etap involves trains with caged compartments specifically designed for prisoners, who are provided with little fresh air, no showers, and only limited access to food or a toilet.
The transfers can take days, weeks, or even months as the trains stop and convicts spend time in transit prisons. Convicts almost always face humiliation, beatings, and sometimes even death at the hands of their guards.
Whelan, 54, was arrested in Moscow in December 2018 on espionage charges and given a 16-year prison sentence in May 2020 following a trial that was condemned by the United States as a "mockery of justice.”
He is one of more than 10 U.S. citizens who are currently being controversially held in Russian jails and prisons, accused or convicted on charges ranging from drug possession and theft to treason and espionage.
In many cases, the charges against these Americans, including The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich and RFE/RL’s Alsu Kurmasheva, are widely seen as trumped up or transparently political. Some of the sentences far exceed what legal experts say would be normal.