MOSCOW (AP) – A doctor for the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is in prison in the third week of the hunger strike, says his health is deteriorating rapidly and the 44-year-old Kremlin critic he could be on the verge of death.
Doctor Yaroslav Ashikhmin said on Saturday that the results of the tests he received from the Navalny family show him 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.
Anastasia Vasilyeva, head of the doctors’ union, backed by Navalny, said on Twitter that “action must be taken immediately.”
Navalny is the most visible and strongest opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
His personal doctors were not allowed to see him in prison. He went on hunger strike to protest his refusal to let them visit when he began to have severe back pain and a loss of feeling in his legs. Russia’s state penitentiary service says Navalny is getting all the medical help he needs.
Navalny was arrested on January 17 when he returned to Russia from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from Soviet nerve poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian officials have denied any involvement and even questioned whether Navalny was poisoned, as confirmed by several European laboratories.
Asked about Navalny’s worsening situation, US President Joe Biden told reporters on Saturday: “It’s totally unfair and totally inappropriate. Based on a poisoning and then a hunger strike. ”
Navalny was forced to serve two and a half years in prison on the grounds that his long recovery from Germany violated a suspended sentence he had been given for a conviction for fraud in a case Navalny says was politically motivated.