Russian Penal Officials Isolating Deserters and Those Convicted of Political Crimes from General Prison Population in Magadan, Grishin Says

Paul Goble Staunton, May 18 – Russian prison officials have always faced a difficult choice: isolating those prisoners they consider most dangerous often leading to explosions or allowing them to be part of the general prison population and seeing the influence of their views spread to other groups. Now, in Magadan, a place synonymous with the GULAG for most Russians, jailors are isolating both those who have deserted from the Russian military and those convicted of political crimes from other groups, according to Andrey Grishin, a journalist from there who fled abroad in 2023 and now faces charges. He reports on the continued existence of this special isolation camp on the basis of his own knowledge of the region, conversations with two victims who have since been released from it, and the reports of family members of others who remain incarcerated in this special zone (nemoskva.net/2026/05/18/barak-dlya-politicheskih/). The decision to create such an isolator, Grishin says, obviously came from Moscow; but given the ways in which such prisoners incarcerated there are being mistreated is especially worrisome given that what the authorities are likely to do elsewhere, they have begun in the symbolically loaded Magadan region.