World News | Kremlin critic missing in prison transfer, allies say

TALLINN (Estonia), Feb. 18 (AP) — Relatives and allies of an opposition politician imprisoned in Russia say they have not heard from him for a month and fear for his safety.

Andrei Pivovarov, who was sentenced to four years in prison last year, was transferred from a detention center in southern Russia in December. In the weeks that followed, he occasionally wrote to his loved ones from detention centers in other Russian cities that served as stopovers en route to his undisclosed final destination.

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Pivovarov’s partner, Tatyana Usmanova, received the last such letter on Jan. 18. In his letter, the politician said he was in a detention center in his hometown of St. Petersburg and had been told he would soon be sent to a colony of exile in Russia. Nearby Karelia region.

“After that, there was silence,” Usmanova told The Associated Press.

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Letters and formal requests to prisons in Karelia and surrounding St. Petersburg, as well as Russia’s State Prison Service, have yielded no results, and Pivovarov’s whereabouts remain unknown, she said.

“We don’t know if he’s alive; if he’s feeling well; if he’s been tortured or abused in some way,” Usmanova said. “We don’t know anything. And it’s very hard.”

Amnesty International said in a statement on Friday that Pivovarov’s situation amounted to an enforced disappearance.

The group’s Russia director, Natalia Zvyagina, called Russia’s prison transfer system “terrible” and urged authorities to disclose Pivovarov’s whereabouts and release him. She said he was “received an unfair sentence on politically motivated charges” that do not exist under international law.

Russia’s State Prison Service did not immediately respond to The Associated Press’ request for comment.

Prison transfers in Russia are known to take a long time, sometimes weeks, during which time prisoners are not accessible and information on their whereabouts is limited. Prisoners are transported to special train carriages on regular trains and pass through various detention centers in sometimes remote areas, Usmanova said.

Pivovarov was pulled from a flight to Warsaw at St. Petersburg airport before departure in May 2021 and taken to the southern city of Krasnodar.

The opposition group he led, Open Russia, had been disbanded days earlier to protect its members from prosecution by Russian authorities as an “undesirable” organization. The government cited a 2015 law that made it a criminal offense to join such organizations.

In Krasnodar, Pivovarov was accused of supporting a local candidate on behalf of a “undesirable” organization. The charges against him are based on his social media posts, which he has rejected as politically motivated and sparked by his planned run for the Russian parliament in 2021.

He was convicted and sentenced in July, at a time when Russia’s war in Ukraine and a sweeping crackdown on dissent were in full swing.

In a written interview from prison in December, before his transfer from Krasnodar, Pivovarov told The Associated Press that his arrest was a surprise — “to put it mildly, when a plane It was an unbelievable feeling when the plane was turning in the air. The runway was because of you”—but his line didn’t.

“By the summer of 2022, the political sphere was completely purged. Those who did not leave ended up in jail like me,” the 41-year-old wrote.

Despite his detention, Pivovarov managed to run, albeit unsuccessfully, for the Russian parliament in 2021. He was one of the few opposition politicians allowed to vote, and his team campaigned while he was incarcerated.

“In general, opposition activism in Russia is the task of finding a way out where there is no way out. They ban everything for you and watch what you will do,” Pivovarov wrote. “They tried to shut me up, but it backfired.”

He said his campaign became a platform for him and his allies to have a voice.

It was in prison that he learned that President Vladimir Putin had launched “a special military operation” in Ukraine.

Other inmates with TVs in their cells initially focused on the war in Ukraine “like a movie, a football game, you’re supposed to be rooting for our people,” the politician said. But that attitude changed last summer, when the Wagner Group, a Russian private military contractor, began recruiting criminals to fight in Ukraine.

“The opportunity to go there is seen as an opportunity to avoid a long term (serving a sentence),” Pivovarov said, adding that the motivation of the prisoners was mainly desperation.

At his factory, about 150 people have signed up, he said.

Asked whether opposition activism had made any sense in recent years, given that the Kremlin has either imprisoned or deported most activists from Russia, Pivovarov said “certainly it has”, but acknowledged that some things could have been taken different way.

“Looking back, you realize maybe we didn’t get all our priorities straight. Focusing on corruption, authoritarianism, rights violations, we ignored the militarism that was emerging,” he said.

“But the fact that civil society, alternative information outlets and (opposition) leaders, even behind bars or in exile, still exist — that matters.” (AP)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)