MOSCOW (AP) – Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is in the third week of a hunger strike while behind bars, will be admitted to a hospital in another prison, the Russian civil service said on Monday after the politician’s doctor said he could be close to death.
The prison service, FSIN, also said Navalny had agreed to take vitamin therapy, but an ally of the 44-year-old Kremlin critic questioned that and the hospital transfer, saying his lawyers should confirm both.
The service said in a statement that Navalny would be transferred from a penal colony just east of Moscow to a prison 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’s opposition leader, dr. Yaroslav Ashikhmin, said on Saturday that the test results provided by the family show that Navalny has a sharply increased level of potassium, which can cause cardiac arrest, and elevated creatinine levels indicating weakened kidneys.
“Our patient could die at any moment,” he said in a Facebook post.
Reports of Navalny’s rapidly declining health have provoked international outrage, urging the Russian authorities to provide the politician with adequate medical assistance. European Union foreign ministers assess the bloc’s strategy towards Russia Monday following the news about his health.
Navalny, the fiercest opponent of President Vladimir Putin, was arrested in January on his return from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a poisoning of the nerve agent he blames on the Kremlin – accusations rejected by Russian officials has. Navalny’s arrest has caused a massive wave of protests across Russia, the biggest challenge in recent years. Shortly afterwards, a court ordered him to serve 2 1/2 years in prison on the basis of a conviction in 2014 that the European Court of Human Rights was ‘arbitrary and apparently unreasonable’.
Navalny went on strike in prison with a hunger strike against refusing to have his doctors visit when he began to experience severe back pain and a loss of feeling in his legs. The Russian civil service said Navalny was receiving all the medical help he needed.
In response to the worrying news about Navalny’s health over the weekend, his team called for a nationwide rally on Wednesday, the same day that Putin will deliver his annual state of the nation address. According to a website dedicated to the protests, protests are planned in 77 Russian cities from Monday afternoon.
The Interior Ministry on Monday issued a statement urging Russians not to take part in unauthorized rallies, citing coronavirus risks and claiming that some “destructive” participants could cause unrest. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said police would consider any unauthorized demonstrations illegal. In the past, security forces have broken up demonstrations by force.
The Russian authorities have already taken their fight against Navalny’s allies and supporters to a new level, with the Moscow prosecutor’s office requesting a court last week to label Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption and its network of regional offices as extremist groups.
According to human rights advocates, if it happens, the foundation and the regional offices would be banned and their activities paralyzed, and those who work for one of them could be prosecuted. Donating money to one of the two – something thousands of Russians have been doing on a regular basis in recent years – would also be a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment.
For now, several Navalny allies have dismissed the move to bring him to the jail hospital as inadequate. Navalny’s top strategist, Leonid Volkov, said no one should assume it was happening until opposition leader’s lawyers confirmed it. “Until the lawyers track him down, 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 prison where Navalny was to be brought on Monday afternoon, but had not yet seen the politician, Volkov said.
Ivan Zhdanov, head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, tweeted on Monday that the transfer would simply take the politician to another “troubled colony, with only a large in-patient facility, where serious illness is transmitted. . ”
Dr Anastasia Vasilyeva, head of the Navalny-backed Alliance of Physicians ‘Union and also the politician’s personal doctor, noted that it’ is not a hospital where a diagnosis can be made and treatment (can) be prescribed for his not ailments’, but rather ‘A prison where tuberculosis is treated.’
She again asked the prison to show her and other doctors.
Since last month, the politician has been serving his sentence in a penal colony notorious for the difficult circumstances.
Navalny complained about being insomnia because guards checked on him hourly at night, saying he developed severe back pain and numbness in his legs within weeks of being transferred to the colony. Prison officials rejected his demands for a visit from an independent ‘civilian doctor’ and he began a hunger strike on 31 March.
In a message from the jail Friday, Navalny said prison officials threatened to treat him “threateningly,” using “forced jacket 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 them to to give Navalny access to the right medical care.
Dunja Mijatović, Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, on Monday reiterated her call for Navalny’s release and to “give him full access to medical care in view of his serious deterioration in health.”