Imprisoned Russian 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, has been unexpectedly transferred to an unknown location from correctional colony No. 3 in the western Smolensk region, the sixth prisoner to be moved in recent days.
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.
Also on July 30, supporters of 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, was unexpectedly transferred from a penitentiary in the northwestern region of Arkhangelsk.
The charge against Lik came after he allegedly took photos of a military unit from his apartment window. Investigators say he took pictures to assist Germany's secret services.
A day earlier, 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 Skolichenko's supporters were informed that she was transferred to an unidentified penitentiary in Moscow. The destinations of the other three remain unknown.
Yashin, 40, is an outspoken Kremlin critic and one of the few prominent opposition politicians who stayed in Russia after a wave of repression against those who have condemned Russia's aggression against Ukraine since the full-scale invasion was launched in February 2022.
The sentence handed to Yashin in December 2022 was the harshest among the cases against those charged with discrediting Russia's armed forces under a new law introduced days after the invasion commenced.
The criminal case against Yashin was launched in July 2022. The charge against him stemmed from YouTube posts about alleged crimes committed by the Russian military in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.
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 is a process that 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.