Associates of Andrei Pivovarov say the jailed activist has been located in a cell-type room (PKT) at the notorious IK-7 penal colony in Segezha after relatives and rights groups demanded information about his current whereabouts following what they called his "forced disappearance."
Pivovarov, the former executive director of the now-defunct pro-democracy Open Russia movement, was detained in May 2021 after being taken off a Warsaw-bound plane just before takeoff from St. Petersburg and sentenced to four years in prison in July 2022 on a charge of heading an "undesirable organization."
His family and lawyers had complained that he had been incommunicado since January 18.
"At first, Andrei was hidden from everyone for 30 days, without his relatives being told where he was, and then they sent him to a PKT, where calls and visits are prohibited," Tatyana Usmanova, the former head of Pivovarov's campaign headquarters, told Novaya Gazeta Europe on February 20.
"Andrei Pivovarov continues to be kept in complete isolation. He has been imprisoned for almost two years. During this time, he has had only one meeting with his mother for an hour and a half and a few phone calls. We all expected that from the moment he was transferred to the colony, life would become a little easier. But no, this isn't the case," she added.
In late December, Russian authorities said Pivovarov was transferred from a detention center in the southwestern region of Krasnodar to a transit prison in St. Petersburg, from which he was to be sent to an unspecified prison, which turned out to be the IK-7 penal colony in Segezha, an institution in the Karelia region that has a reputation as being a place where prisoners have been subjected to torture.
The process of transferring convicts in Russia and many other former Soviet republics, known as "etap," involves trains specifically designed for prisoners. Prisoners who travel in such trains are crowded into caged compartments 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.
On February 17, Amnesty International issued a statement calling for the Russian authorities to "immediately reveal Andrei Pivovarov's whereabouts, and immediately and without any conditions release him."
The group also called for reforms to the system of transportation of convicts in the country to bring it in line with international standards of human rights.
The "undesirable organizations" law, adopted in 2015, was part of a series of regulations pushed by the Kremlin that squeezed many nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations that received funding from foreign sources -- mainly from Europe and the United States.