Some residual good news for courage in 2023: Alexei Navalny is alive and has been located in a distant prison colony. His team says the leading opponent of Vladimir Putin’s despotism was moved without announcement to a prison called the Polar Wolf in the remote Arctic region of Yamalo-Nenets. This a frozen, isolated area known for some of the most brutal conditions in the Putin-era gulag.

The context for his isolation is the Russian presidential election scheduled for March 17. There’s no chance Mr. Putin will lose in the rigged political system. But before Mr. Navalny disappeared, he and his team launched a campaign to expose that Mr. Putin is far less popular than the Kremlin claims.