Putin foe ‘poisoned’
Gravely ill after tea spike
A Russian opposition party leader and vocal Vladimir Putin critic is fighting for his life in the hospital after apparently being poisoned — by a cup of tainted tea.
Alexei Navalny, 44, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow Wednesday, — with witnesses reporting that he began screaming in pain.
By Thursday, the longtime Kremlin critic and anti-corruption activist was in a coma and on a ventilator at a Siberian hospital, his spokeswoman said in video posted to Twitter.
“We assume that Alexei was poisoned with something mixed into the tea,” rep Kira Yarmysh wrote.
“It was the only thing that he drank in the morning. Doctors say the toxin was absorbed faster through the hot liquid.”
Hospital staff attributed Navalny’s ailments to an allergic reaction, but Navalny’s physician for several years, Anastasiya Vasilyeva, insisted her patient was poisoned.
An image posted on social media showed Navalny sipping the possibly toxic brew from a disposable cup at the Tomsk airport, according to the Financial Times’ Moscow correspondent, who shared a screengrab.
The politician then began feeling very sick soon after takeoff, according to airline S7.
And it wasn’t airline food making him turn green — Navalny didn’t eat or drink anything while on board, it added.
“At the start of the flight he went to the toilet and didn’t come back,” Pavel Lebedev, a passenger who was on the same flight wrote on social media. “He started feeling really sick. They struggled to bring him round and he was screaming in pain.”
The captain ultimately had to make an emergency landing.
It’s not the first time the Kremlin has been accused of slipping poison into its foes’ tea.
The government was infamously blamed for killing defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 by lacing the former spy’s beverage with radioactive polonium-210.
Journalist Anna Politkovskaya was also served some tainted tea on a 2004 Aeroflot flight. She survived, though was murdered two years later.
Officials in France and Germany are now offering to provide Navalny health care and protection.
President Trump said Thursday his administration is also collecting information on the incident.
“We’re looking at it and [Secretary of State] Mike [Pompeo] is gonna be reporting to me soon,” Trump said.