MOSCOW — Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader who
returned to Russia this year despite an earlier attempt on his life, is in
deteriorating health with unexplained ailments and has received substandard
medical care, his lawyers said on Thursday.
اضافة اعلان
Prison doctors moved Navalny, 44, to a hospital for tests but
offered no explanation for his complaints of severe back pain and numbness in
one leg, and then returned him to the penal colony east of Moscow, said his
lawyer, Olga Mikhailova.
“His health is extremely unfavorable, and every day gets worse,”
she said in an interview after meeting Navalny in prison. His right leg has
numbed to the point he cannot put weight on it, she said. “We are afraid for
his life and his health.”
Navalny collapsed into a coma on an airplane flight in August
and was medically evacuated from Russia to Berlin. After extensive tests there,
both the German and French governments, and international chemical weapons
specialists, confirmed that he had been poisoned with a Soviet-designed
military nerve agent, Novichok.
The poisoning was the latest in a series of assassinations and
attempted assassinations of opponents of President Vladimir Putin that Western
governments have blamed on the Kremlin. Putin has denied any state role in
Navalny’s collapse, arguing that if Russian agents had wanted to kill him they
would have succeeded.
Navalny returned to Russia in January despite his supporters’
fears for his safety. He was detained for a parole violation — failure to
report to Russian authorities while he was being treated in Germany for the poisoning
— on a previous offense that he and his allies dismiss as politically
motivated, and sentenced to more than two years in a penal colony.
His new, so far undiagnosed symptoms, including back pain, began
a month ago but worsened this week, and he could not rule out lingering effects
of the nerve agent poisoning, Mikhailova said.
Navalny had asked his lawyers not to make the symptoms public,
she said. Only after prison officials declined to allow a meeting with Navalny
did they air their worries, which she said deepened after a meeting was
granted.
Prison doctors have provided only ibuprofen pills and an
ibuprofen-based topical ointment for pain, she said, and have refused to pass
along medicines the lawyers provided or allow access for a personal doctor.
The prison health system, she said, has not provided the lawyers
or Navalny a diagnosis for the symptoms. She said she feared if Navalny is not
transferred to receive specialty care soon, his condition will deteriorate.
Russia’s prison authorities said Navalny’s health was “stable
and satisfactory” after an examination, the Tass news agency reported.
Prison doctors are not qualified to treat him, Mikhailova said,
and she has filed appeals to move him to Moscow to be examined by a specialist.
“His condition is worsening, not improving, with the treatment he is getting in
prison,” she added.
His condition has been exacerbated by sleep deprivation, she
said, with guards awakening him hourly, ostensibly to confirm his presence in
the prison barracks, as he is classified as a flight risk.
After his poisoning, Navalny and the open-source investigative
group Bellingcat studied phone records of Russian security service agents and
other clues to reconstruct what they called an attempted assassination.
Navalny said the poison, which can be lethal to the touch, had
been applied to the inside of a pair of his underpants. It was the same class
of nerve agent that sickened several people in England and killed one in 2018,
in what Western intelligence agencies said was a failed attempt to kill Sergei
Skripal, a former Russian spy.
In Germany, Navalny underwent months or rehabilitation and in
interviews described harrowing neurological symptoms including disorientation
and trouble walking. By late last year he said he had seemed to fully recover.
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