MOSCOW (AP) – Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, on the third week of a hunger strike behind bars, will be hospitalized in another prison, the Russian state penitentiary service said on Monday, after the doctor the politician said he could be close to death.
The prison service, FSIN, also said that Navalny had agreed to take vitamin therapy, but a 44-year-old ally of the Kremlin critic also questioned the transfer of the hospital, saying his lawyers you have to confirm both.
The service said in a statement that Navalny would be transferred from a penal colony just east of Moscow to a hospital for convicts in a prison in Vladimir, a city 180 kilometers (110 miles) 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 kidney damage.
“Our patient could die at any time,” he said in a Facebook post.
Reports of Navalny’s rapidly declining health have sparked international outrage and calls on the Russian authorities to urge the politician to provide adequate medical assistance. EU foreign ministers are assessing the bloc’s strategy towards Russia Monday, following news of his health.
Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest opponent, was arrested in January on his return from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nervous breakdown he blames on the Kremlin – allegations that Russian officials have made. they rejected. Navalny’s arrest sparked a massive wave of protests across Russia, the biggest defiance show in years. Shortly afterwards, a court ordered them to serve two and a half years in prison on the basis of a 2014 embezzlement conviction that the European Court of Human Rights considered “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable”.
Navalny went on hunger strike in prison to protest his refusal to allow his doctors to visit when he began to have severe back pain and loss of feeling in his legs. Russia’s state penitentiary service said Navalny was receiving all the medical help he needed.
In response to alarming news about Navalny’s health this weekend, his team convened a nationwide rally on Wednesday, the same day Putin is scheduled to deliver his annual state of the nation address. According to a website dedicated to the protests, demonstrations were planned in 77 Russian cities starting Monday afternoon.
The Interior Ministry issued a statement on Monday urging Russians not to participate in unauthorized rallies, citing coronavirus risks and saying some “destructive” participants could cause unrest. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said police would treat any unauthorized protests as illegal. In the past, security forces have violently disrupted demonstrations.
Russian authorities have already taken repression against Navalny’s allies and supporters to a new level, with the Moscow prosecutor’s office petitioning a court last week to label the Navalny Anti-Corruption Foundation and its network of regional offices as extremist groups.
According to human rights activists, if it happened, both the foundation and the regional offices would be outlawed, paralyzing their operations, and those working for any of them could be prosecuted. Donating money to either of them – which thousands of Russians have done regularly in recent years – would also become a crime punishable by imprisonment.
For the time being, several Navalny allies have rejected the action of bringing him to the prison hospital as insufficient. Navalny’s top strategist Leonid Volkov said no one should assume that will happen until the opposition leader’s lawyers confirm 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 prison where Navalny was to be brought on Monday afternoon, but has not yet seen the politician, Volkov said.
Ivan Zhdanov, head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote on Twitter that the transfer will take the politician only to another “torturous colony, with only a large hospital unit, where seriously ill people are transferred.”
Dr. Anastasia Vasilyeva, head of the Alliance of Physicians’ Union supported by Navalny and also the politician’s personal physician, noted that “it is not a hospital where a diagnosis can be made and treatment can be prescribed for his ailments.” , but rather “A prison where tuberculosis is treated.”
She again asked the prison to let her and other doctors see him.
Since last month, the politician is serving his sentence in a criminal colony known for its harsh conditions.
Navalny complained of lack of sleep as guards performed night checks on her at night and said she developed severe back pain and numbness in her legs within weeks of transferring to the colony. His requests to visit an independent “civilian” doctor were rejected by prison officials and he went on hunger strike on March 31.
In a message from prison on Friday, Navalny said prison officials threatened to force him “imminently”, using “straitjackets and other pleasures.”
Over the weekend, 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 – calling for Navalny access to health care.
On Monday, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatović reiterated his demands for Navalny’s release and “to give him full access to medical care, given the serious deterioration of his health”.