Imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s health deteriorating as lawyers denied access
- Last August President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic survived a near-fatal poisoning with Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent
- Navalny’s lawyer Olga Mikhailova said on Wednesday he had recently been complaining of strong back pain, adding that his leg has gone numb this week
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Lawyers for imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny sounded the alarm on Wednesday over the politician’s deteriorating health in prison and demanded immediate access, saying he complained of back pain and leg numbness.
Last August President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic survived a near-fatal poisoning with Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent, and was flown to Germany for treatment.
The 44-year-old was arrested upon his return to Russia in January and was sentenced to two-and-a-half-years in jail the following month. He is serving his sentence outside Moscow, in a penal colony notorious for harsh discipline.
Navalny’s lawyer Olga Mikhailova said on Wednesday he had recently been complaining of strong back pain, adding that his leg has gone numb this week.
The opposition politician had seen a neurologist but the doctor had not said what was wrong with him, Mikhailova said, adding that Navalny had simply been given ibuprofen.
“That’s all his treatment,” she said, adding that the painkiller did not help, while his leg went numb on Tuesday. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He should be seen by a proper doctor.”
Mikhailova said she was not allowed to see Navalny on Wednesday. Navalny’s team expressed strong concern.
The opposition politician’s right-hand man Leonid Volkov suggested the prison administration might be hiding the fact that he had been transferred to a prison infirmary.
“We don’t know where Alexei Navalny is and why they are hiding him from his lawyers,” Volkov said on Facebook.
Maria Pevchikh, head of investigations at Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said: “The rapid deterioration of his health condition raises our extreme concerns.”
“We believe that Navalny’s life is in danger and demand immediate access to him for his lawyers,” she tweeted.
Volkov said that on Thursday Navalny’s lawyers would make a new attempt to see him in his prison in the town of Pokrov, located more than 100 kilometres east of Moscow.
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service on Thursday said his health was “stable and satisfactory”.
The penitentiary service said prisons in the Vladimir region, where Navalny was being held, had carried out medical examinations on inmates on Wednesday.
It said the checks had been conducted at inmates’ request and that the opposition politician had also been examined.
“His health is deemed stable and satisfactory, according to the results of the examination,” the Interfax news agency cited the penitentiary service as saying.
The statement did not satisfy Navalny allies.
“Now we are really worried,” Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation wrote on Twitter. “Even the Federal Penitentiary Service can’t call Navalny’s condition good.”
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Navalny himself has described the Pokrov prison as a “concentration camp”, saying he was woken up every hour at night because he was considered a flight risk and guards recorded him on camera during his sleep.
Last month Navalny was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a penal colony for breaching parole terms while in Germany recovering from the poisoning attack.
On Tuesday, his team launched a campaign seeking Navalny’s release and announced plans to stage what they said would be “modern Russia’s biggest protest”.
Navalny’s allies urged supporters to register with the website free.navalny.com and mark their location on an online map.
The team said they would set a date for the protest once 500,000 supporters have been registered.
Putin critic Alexei Navalny says he is held in ‘concentration camp’
As of Wednesday, 200,000 people have signed up, including more than 40,000 people in Moscow and more than 22,000 in the country’s second city, Saint Petersburg.
Tens of thousands of Navalny supporters took to the streets across Russia in January and February but those rallies were broken up and more than 10,000 were detained.
Washington and Brussels have demanded Navalny’s immediate release and imposed sanctions on Russian officials over his poisoning. On Wednesday, Canada followed suit, slapping sanctions against nine Russian officials in response to “gross” rights violations and Navalny’s silencing.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday said Putin was responsible for “terrible things”, but would not go so far as Biden in calling the Russian leader a “killer”.
Trudeau, unaccustomed to criticising other world leaders in public, was questioned during an interview on SiriusXM radio’s The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge about Biden’s remarks.
“I’m sure (Putin) is responsible for all sorts of terrible things because his behaviour continues to demonstrate that,” he said.
He cited as examples Russia’s annexation of Crimea, “significant cyber attacks he’s responsible for and the attempts to destabilize our democracies”.
Trudeau said his impression of Putin in their rare meetings at international forums over the past five years was that “he will look at you and say whatever is convenient to him at any given moment”.
“He is not particularly interested in what the Western world or what Canada thinks of him,” he added.
Additional reporting by Reuters
