A doctor for imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is on his third week of hunger strike, said his health is deteriorating rapidly and the 44-year-old Kremlin critic is on the verge of death.
Yaroslav Ashikhmin, a doctor, said on Saturday that test results he received from Navalny’s relatives reveal very high levels of potassium, which can cause cardiac arrest, and troubling creatinine levels that indicate kidney problems.
“Our patient could die at any moment,” he said in a post on Facebook.
Urgent measures
Anastasia Vasilyeva, president of the Navalny-backed Physicians Alliance union, said on Twitter that “immediate action must be taken.”
Navalny is the most prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
His personal doctors have not been allowed to review him in prison. Navalny went on a hunger strike in protest for not allowing his doctors to visit when he started experiencing severe back pain and numbness in his legs. The Russian state prison ensures that Navalny receives all necessary medical care.
Navalny was arrested on January 17 on his return to Russia from Germany, where he recovered from neurotoxin poisoning for five months, for which he has held the Kremlin responsible. The Russian authorities have rejected such allegations, even calling into question that Navalny was poisoned, despite the fact that this was confirmed by several European laboratories.
Shortly after the 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 had violated a suspended sentence for embezzlement in 2014 which he says is politically motivated and that the court The European Human Rights Committee considered it “arbitrary and clearly unacceptable”.