Navalny ‘could die at any moment’ in prison, says doctor

A DOCTOR for imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is in the third week of a hunger strike, has said his health is deteriorating rapidly and he could be on the verge of death.

Yaroslav Ashikhmin said test results he received from the 44-year-old’s family show sharply elevated levels of potassium, which can bring on cardiac arrest, and heightened creatinine levels that indicate impaired kidneys.

“Our patient could die at any moment,” he said in a Facebook post.

Anastasia Vasilyeva, head of the Navalny-backed Alliance of Doctors union, said on Twitter that “action must be taken immediately”.

Mr Navalny, inset, is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most visible and adamant critic.

His personal doctors have not been allowed to see him in prison. He went on hunger strike to protest against the refusal to let them visit when he began experiencing severe back pain and a loss of feeling in his legs.

Russia’s state prison service has said Mr Navalny is receiving all the medical help he needs.

He was arrested on January 17 when he returned to Russia from Germany, where had spent five months recovering from Soviet nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian officials have denied any involvement and even questioned whether he was poisoned, which was confirmed by several European laboratories.

Asked about Mr Navalny’s worsening condition, US President Joe Biden told reporters: “It’s totally, totally unfair and totally inappropriate. On the basis of having the poison and then on a hunger strike.”

Mr Navalny was ordered to serve two-and-ahalf years in prison on the grounds that his long recovery in Germany violated a suspended sentence that he had been given for a fraud conviction in a case that he says was politically motivated. Mr Navalny is demanding a visit from his physician after developing severe back pain and numbness in his legs in prison.

The opposition leader’s arrest in January triggered a massive wave of protests all across Russia, the biggest show of defiance in recent years.

Soon after the arrest, a court ordered Mr Navalny to serve twoand-a-half years in prison on a 2014 embezzlement conviction he said was fabricated and the European Court of Human Rights deemed to be “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable”.