MOSCOW (AP) – Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has accused prison authorities of failing to provide adequate treatment for back pain and leg problems, saying in a letter posted Thursday that his physical condition had worsened in prison and that now he has trouble walking.
Navalny blamed his health problems on prison officials who did not provide the right medicines and refused to allow his doctor to visit him behind bars. He also complained in a second letter that the time checks a night watchman makes are equivocal with sleep deprivation.
Copies of his letters to prison officials and Russia’s top prosecutor were posted on Navalny’s website.
Navalny, 44, who is President Vladimir Putin’s most sincere opponent, was arrested on January 17 on his return from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nervous breakdown he blames. on the Kremlin. The Russian authorities rejected the accusation.
Last month, Navalny was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for violating probation during his convalescence in Germany. The sentence comes from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Navalny rejected as fabricated – and which the European Court of Human Rights ruled to be illegal.
“My condition has worsened. I feel sharp pain in my right leg and I feel numbness in my lower back, “Navalny wrote in the letter. “I have trouble walking.”
He said authorities gave him standard pain pills and ointment, but refused to accept medication previously prescribed by his doctor.
He accused prison officials of undermining their health by “deliberately denying proper medical care.”
Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said earlier Thursday that Navalny had undergone medical checks the day before, describing his condition as “stable and satisfactory.”
But Navalny’s lawyer, Olga Mihailova, said on Thursday, after visiting him in prison, that “his right leg has a terrible shape.”
Mihailova told Dozhd TV that Navalny was taken to a hospital outside his MRI scan on Wednesday, but was not given the results.
She said Navalny had been suffering from back pain for four weeks, but prison officials would not allow a visit to his doctor. The lawyer argued that the authorities should transfer Navalny to Moscow so that he could receive better treatment.
Navalny’s wife, Yulia, said on Instagram that she did not trust the doctors in the prison and called on the authorities to let the doctors who trusted her and her husband see him. She said prison authorities refused to accept a note from Navalny’s doctor prescribing some exercises to ease her back pain.
She denounced her husband’s treatment in prison as part of Putin’s “personal revenge.”
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the Kremlin did not respect Navalny’s condition, asking questions of the penitentiary service.
Earlier this month, Navalny was moved to a prison colony in Pokrov, Vladimir region, 85 kilometers (53 miles) east of Moscow. The facility stands out among Russian penitentiaries for its particularly strict regime, which includes routines such as state of mind for hours on end.
In a note earlier this month, Navalny described the IK-2 prison as a “friendly concentration camp.” He said he did not see “even a hint of violence” there, but lived under controls that he compared to George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
Navalny, whom prison officials had previously identified as a flight hazard, said he was under close surveillance, including a guard who wakes him up every hour at night and films him to show he is in the right place.
He complained about the practice in a separate letter to the head of the penitentiary service and the senior prosecutor, which was also released on Thursday, saying that the hourly checks represent “sleep deprivation torture”.
Navalny’s arrest in January sparked a wave of protests that drew tens of thousands of participants across Russia. Authorities detained about 11,000 people, many of whom were fined or sentenced to between seven and 15 days in prison.
Earlier this week, Navalny’s associates called for another mass protest across the country to demand his release from prison. They urged the Russians to sign up for a protest on an interactive map and said they would set a date for it when the number of people willing to participate reached at least 500,000 nationwide.
More than 250,000 have registered on a dedicated site since it opened on Tuesday.
Russian officials have rejected calls by the United States and the European Union to release Navalny and stop cracking down on his supporters.
___
An earlier version corrected Navalny’s lawyer’s last name to Mikhailova, not Volkova,