A doctor from jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is in his third week of hunger strike, said his health was deteriorating rapidly and the 44-year-old Kremlin critic could be found in the brink of death.
Dr. Yaroslav Ashikhmin said on Saturday that the results of tests he received from Navalny’s relatives reveal a very high level of potassium, which can cause cardiac arrest, and worrying levels of creatinine that indicate kidney problems.
“Our patient could die at any time,” he stated in a message posted on Facebook.
urgent measures
Anastasia Vasilyeva, who chairs the Medical Alliance union which has Navalny’s support, said on Twitter that “action must be taken immediately.”
Navalny is the most prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Their personal doctors have not been able to get them authorized to check in jail. Navalny began the hunger strike in protest of not allowing his doctors to visit when he began to suffer severe back pain and numbness in his legs. The Russian state penitentiary service says Navalny is receiving all necessary medical care.
Navalny was arrested on January 17 on his return to Russia from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from poisoning with a neurotoxin, for which he has made the Kremlin responsible. Russian authorities have denied these allegations and even questioned whether Navalny had been poisoned, although this was confirmed by several European laboratories.
Shortly after his arrest, a court ordered Navalny to serve two-and-a-half years in prison on the grounds that during his long recovery in Germany he violated a suspended sentence he had received for embezzlement in 2014 which he says is politically motivated and which the European Court of Human Rights considered “arbitrary and clearly unacceptable”.