PUTIN FOE IN HOSPITAL
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was hospitalized with suspected poisoning that his allies believe is linked to his political activity.
Booked on an early-morning flight back to Moscow, Alexei Navalny began his day with a rushed breakfast — just a cup of tea in a plastic cup — at the airport in the Siberian city of Tomsk. Soon after his flight took off Thursday, he rushed to the toilet feeling violently ill. Just a few hundred miles into its nearly 2,000-mile flight, the plane made an emergency landing, and Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, groaning in agony before losing consciousness, was taken on a gurney to an ambulance waiting on the tarmac. Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, who was traveling with him, announced on Twitter that he had been poisoned, probably by something put in his tea at the airport’s Vienna Café. Navalny, who has often described President Vladimir Putin as the leader of a “party of crooks and thieves,” had traveled to Siberia to help organize opposition candidates before local elections next month. Doctors at the No. 1 Clinical Hospital in Omsk, the Siberian city where the plane made its emergency landing, initially said Navalny was on a ventilator in serious condition. It later reported that his condition, although still grave, had stabilized. As alarm that Navalny might die receded, speculation of foul play escalated, particularly after his personal physician and fellow opposition activist, Anastasia Vasilyeva, arrived at the hospital in Omsk only to be denied access to his medical records and the intensive care ward where he was being treated. “Nobody is allowed in to see Aleksei Navalny or to see his medical records,” Vasiliyeva, who flew to Tomsk with the opposition leader’s wife, Yulia, wrote in a Twitter post. Vasiliyeva, an optometrist, treated Navalny for severe eye burns after an unidentified assailant in 2017 threw a green chemical liquid in his face. Navalny’s wife was allowed into his ward on Thursday evening. Berlin-based movie producer Jaka Bizilj said his foundation was flying an air ambulance to Omsk and hoped to take Navalny back to a Berlin hospital, Charité. Bizilj did the same in 2018 after a member of the Russian group Pussy Riot had been poisoned. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France, meeting in France, offered their assistance, including medical help and possible asylum. “What urgently needs to be clarified is how this situation came about,” Merkel said. While the Kremlin insisted Thursday that it was too early to say what had happened to its best-known and most persistent critic, it was clear by the end of the day that Navalny had joined a long list of Putin’s opponents to be suddenly afflicted by bizarre and sometimes fatal medical emergencies, often after drinking tea. The Kremlin and its supporters have long detested Navalny because of the investigations he has led into graft by officials — including, most vividly, the former prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev. Navalny has been harassed and jailed numerous times for short periods, but authorities have refrained from harsher steps that could elevate his national profile.