MOSCOW (AP) – Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is on his third week of hunger strike while behind bars, will be admitted to a hospital in another prison, the prison service said on Monday. the Russian state, after the politician’s doctor said he could be close to death.
The prison service, FSIN, also said Navalny had agreed to take vitamins, but an ally of the 44-year-old Kremlin critic questioned this and the hospital transfer, saying his lawyers should confirm them all. two.
The service said in a statement that Navalny would be transferred from a penal colony east of Moscow to a penitentiary hospital in a prison in Vladimir, a city 180 kilometers from the capital. According to the statement, Navalny’s condition is considered “satisfactory”.
But the doctor of the opposition leader, Dr. Yaroslav Ashikhmin, said on Saturday that the results of tests provided by the family show that Navalny has high levels of potassium, which can cause cardiac arrest, and high levels of creatinine that indicate deterioration of the kidneys.
“Our patient could die at any time,” he said in a post on Facebook.
Reports of Navalny’s rapidly declining health sparked international outrage and called for urging Russian authorities to provide the politician with adequate medical help. EU foreign ministers were assessing the bloc’s strategy towards Russia on Monday after the news about his health.
Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest opponent, was arrested in January on his return from Germany, where he had spent five months recovering from poisoning by a nerve agent blaming the Kremlin, allegations that Russian officials have rejected. . Navalny’s arrest sparked a massive wave of protests across Russia, the biggest show of defiance in recent years. Shortly afterwards, a court ordered him to serve 2 and a half years in prison for a 2014 embezzlement sentence that the European Court of Human Rights considered “arbitrary and manifestly irrational”.
Navalny went on hunger strike in prison to protest his refusal to let his doctors visit when he began to suffer from severe back pain and a loss of sensation in his legs. Russia’s state penitentiary service has said Navalny was receiving all the medical help he needed.
In response to alarming news about Navalny’s health this weekend, his team has called for a national rally on Wednesday, the same day Putin is scheduled to deliver his annual speech on the state of the nation. According to a website dedicated to the protests, as of Monday afternoon, demonstrations were planned in 77 Russian cities.
The Interior Ministry issued a statement on Monday urging Russians not to participate in unauthorized rallies, citing coronavirus risks and alleging that some “destructive-minded” participants could cause unrest. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said police would consider any unauthorized protest illegal. In the past, security forces have violently broken off demonstrations.
Russian authorities have already taken repression against Navalny’s allies and supporters to a new level, the Moscow prosecutor’s office last week asked a court to label the Navalny Foundation for the fight against extremist groups as extremist groups. corruption and its network of regional offices.
According to human rights defenders, if it happened, both the foundation and the regional offices would be outlawed, paralyzing their operations, and those working for either could be prosecuted. Giving money to either (something thousands of Russians have been doing regularly in recent years) would also become a criminal offense punishable by a prison sentence.
So far, several Navalny allies have rejected the move to take him to the prison hospital as insufficient. Navalny’s top strategist, Leonid Volkov, said no one should assume it was happening until the opposition leader’s lawyers confirmed it. “Until the lawyers locate him, we will not know where he is and what is happening to him,” Volkov wrote in a Facebook post.
One of the lawyers arrived at the jail where he was supposed to take Navalny on Monday afternoon, but has not yet seen the politician, Volkov said.
Ivan Zhdanov, the head of the Foundation for the Fight against Corruption, tweeted on Monday that the move would take the politician to another “tormenting colony, with only one major hospital, where seriously ill people are being moved.”
Dr. Anastasia Vasilyeva, head of the Navalny-backed Alliance of Physicians’ Union and also the politician’s personal physician, noted that “it was not a hospital where the diagnosis can be determined and the treatment of their diseases can be prescribed.” but rather “A prison where tuberculosis is treated.”
She called back to the jail to let him see her and other doctors.
Since last month, the politician has been serving his sentence in a penal colony known for its harsh conditions.
Navalny has complained of a lack of sleep because the guards check him every hour at night and said he developed severe back pain and numbness in his legs within weeks of being transferred to the colony. His demands for a visit from an independent “civilian” doctor were rejected by prison officials and he went on a hunger strike on 31 March.
In a message from the jail on Friday, Navalny said prison officials threatened to feed him “imminently,” with “straitjackets and other pleasures.”
Over the weekend, the French newspaper Le Monde published a letter to Putin signed by dozens of prominent cultural figures, including writers Salman Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa, singer Patti Smith and actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Kristin Scott Thomas, asking that Navalny had access to medical care.
On Monday, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatović reiterated her calls for Navalny’s release and “give him full access to health care in light of his serious deterioration in health.” “.