MOSCOW (AP) – Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has accused prison authorities of failing to provide adequate treatment for back pain and leg problems, and said in a letter published on Thursday that his his physical condition has worsened in prison and he now has trouble walking.
Navalny blamed his health problems on prison officials for not providing the proper medications and refused to allow his doctor to visit him behind bars. He also complained in a second letter that the hourly checks by a night guard amounted to torture depriving him of sleep.
Copies of his letters to prison officials and Russia’s top prosecutor were posted on Navalny’s website.
Navalny, 44, is the most outspoken opponent of President Vladimir Putin, was arrested on January 17 on his return from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve agent poisoning that blames the Kremlin. Russian authorities have rejected the accusation.
Last month, Navalny was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for violating the conditions of his parole while convalescing in Germany. The sentence comes from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Navalny has dismissed as fabricated and which the European Court of Human Rights has ruled illegal.
“My condition has worsened. I feel sharp pain in my right leg and I feel numbness in my lower back, “Navalny wrote in the letter.” I have trouble walking. “
He said authorities gave him standard pills and ointments for his pain, but he refused to accept the medications previously prescribed by his doctor.
He accused prison officials of undermining his health with a “deliberate denial of due medical care.”
Russia’s Federal Prison Service said earlier on Thursday that Navalny had undergone medical check-ups the day before and described his condition as “stable and satisfactory.”
But Navalny’s lawyer, Olga Mikhailova, said Thursday after visiting him in prison that “his right leg has a terrible shape.”
Mikhailova told Dozhd TV that Navalny was taken to a hospital on Wednesday outside his prison by MRI, but was not given the results.
He said Navalny had experienced back pain for four weeks, but prison officials would not allow his doctor’s visit either. The lawyer argued that the authorities should move Navalny to Moscow so that he could receive better treatment.
Navalny’s wife, Yulia, said on Instagram that she does not trust doctors in prison and asked authorities to let doctors who trust her and her husband see. He said prison authorities refused to accept a note from Navalny’s doctor prescribing some exercises to relieve his back pain.
She denounced her husband’s treatment in prison as part of Putin’s “personal revenge.”
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the Kremlin did not follow Navalny’s condition, referring questions to the prison service.
Earlier this month, Navalny was transferred to a prison colony in Pokrov, Vladimir region, 85 kilometers (53 miles) east of Moscow. The facility stands out among Russian prisons for its particularly strict regime that includes routines such as being attentive for hours.
In a note earlier this month, Navalny described the IK-2 prison as a “friendly concentration camp.” He said he had not seen “a single touch of violence,” but lived under controls that he compared to George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
Navalny, whom prison authorities had previously marked as a flight hazard, said he was under particularly close supervision, including a guard who woke him up every hour of the night and filmed him to prove he was in the required location.
He complained about the practice in a separate letter addressed to the head of the penitentiary service and the senior prosecutor, who was also released on Thursday, saying the hourly checks amounted to “sleep deprivation torture”.
Navalny’s arrest in January sparked a wave of protests that drew tens of thousands of participants across Russia. Authorities detained approximately 11,000 people, many of whom were fined or received prison sentences of between seven and fifteen days.
Navalny’s associates called another mass protest across the country earlier this week to demand his release from prison. They urged Russians to sign up for a protest on an interactive map and said they would set a date for the number of people willing to participate to reach at least 500,000 nationwide.
More than 250,000 have registered on a dedicated website since it opened on Tuesday.
Russian officials have rejected demands from the United States and the European Union to release Navalny and stop repression against his supporters.
___
An earlier version corrected Navalny’s lawyer’s surname to Mikhailova, not Volkova,