German doctors gain access to Putin rival
A CLOSE associate of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is in a coma in a Siberian hospital, said German doctors now have access to Mr Navalny as supporters push for him to be moved to a Berlin clinic.
“The German doctors who came on this flight from Nuremberg, who were refused to get access to this patient, finally just got access to him several minutes ago,” Leonid Volkov said during a news conference in Berlin.
Mr Navalny, 44, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk on Thursday and was taken to hospital after the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk.
His team made arrangements to transfer him to Charite, a clinic in Berlin that has a history of treating famous foreign leaders or dissidents, but local doctors refused to authorise a transfer, saying the politician was too unstable to be transported.
Mr Navalny, one of President
Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics, was admitted to the intensive care unit following what his supporters are calling a suspected poisoning that they believe was engineered by the Kremlin.
A plane with German specialists and all the necessary equipment landed at Omsk airport yesterday morning, prepared to take Mr Navalny to the clinic in Berlin.
But doctors treating Mr Navalny said his condition was too unstable to transport him and bristled at the idea of consulting with German specialists, saying that doctors that flew in from Moscow overnight were competent enough.
Omsk hospital deputy chief doctor Anatoly Kalinichenko also said that no traces of poison were found in Mr Navalny’s body.
“Poisoning as a diagnosis remains on the back burner, but we don’t believe that the patient suffered from poisoning,” Dr Kalinichenko told reporters.
Dr Kalinichenko added that a diagnosis has been relayed to Mr Navalny’s family members.
He refused to reveal it to reporters, citing a law preventing medical workers from disclosing confidential patient information.
Mr Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh tweeted that the politician’s family was not given a diagnosis, but rather “a range of symptoms that can be interpreted differently”.
“Doctors still can’t determine the cause of Alexei’s condition,” she said.
“The ban on transferring Navalny is needed to stall and wait until the poison in his body can no longer be traced. Yet every hour of stalling creates a threat to his life,” Ms Yarmysh tweeted.
Like many other opposition politicians in Russia, Mr Navalny has been frequently detained by law enforcement and harassed by proKremlin groups.
In 2017, he was attacked by several men who threw antiseptic in his face, damaging an eye.