Former head of regional Navalny headquarters disappears from penal colony

Lilia Chanysheva, the imprisoned former head of late Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s headquarters in the Volga region city of Ufa, has disappeared from the penal colony where she had been serving a nine-and-a-half year sentence, her husband said on Monday.

Almaz Gatin wrote on X that he had gone to the penal colony in the Perm region in the Russian Urals on Sunday with a parcel for his wife only to be told that Chanysheva had been moved on 26 July.

“Today I took an appeal in writing to the penal colony. I appeal to everyone to help me find my wife. Please let me know if anyone knows anything of the whereabouts of L. A. Chanysheva,” Gatin wrote.

Chanysheva was the first person to be detained in a criminal case for “extremism” that was brought against Navalny and his supporters in September 2021.

A court in the city of Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan, sentenced Chanysheva to seven and a half years in prison in June 2023 for “calling for extremism” and participating in “an extremist community”. However, after the Prosecutor General’s Office complained that her original sentence had been “too lenient” given that she had “incited” local residents to take to the streets and protest, the court increased it to nine and a half years in April.

In May, a petition written by Chanysheva asking Vladimir Putin to pardon her was published. In the letter, which has been confirmed to be authentic, Chanysheva cited the poor health of her parents and said that she “wished to devote herself to her family”.