Severely ill Pussy Riot member moved to Germany for treatment
MOSCOW >> A member of Russia’s Pussy Riot protest group says a severely ill fellow activist was taken to Germany on Saturday for treatment after his suspected poisoning.
Maria Alekhina said Pyotr Verzilov was flown to Berlin, but she did not give details.
Independent news site Meduza reported that Verzilov’s partner, Veronika Nikulshina, said a doctor from a Berlin clinic who is friends with the ill man’s father suggested medical care outside Russia.
Verzilov was hospitalized in Moscow on Tuesday and had remained in intensive care, Pussy Riot members said last week.
Alekhina said he regained consciousness Friday.
She also said she thinks he was poisoned for political reasons.
Verzilov, Nikulshina and two other Pussy Riot members served 15-day jail sentences for running onto the Moscow field where soccer’s World Cup final was being played in July. Their protest of what they described as the excessive powers of Russia’s police briefly disrupted the match with a very large broadcast audience.
Verzilov fell ill as new allegations arose over the
March nerve-agent poisoning of a Russian former double agent and his daughter in the British city of Salisbury.
British authorities named two men — alleged to be agents of Russia’s military intelligence service — in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. The authorities showed surveillance-camera images of the pair in Salisbury.
Several Kremlin opponents have died from poisoning or suspected poisoning during the past 15 years.
Alexander Litvinenko, a former member of Russia’s domestic security service, succumbed slowly in London after ingesting a radioactive isotope in 2006. He fell ill hours after meeting with two Russians who
Britain claimed were the assassins.
Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, became sick after drinking tea on an Aeroflot flight in 2004. She was traveling to southern Russia to try to help negotiate the Beslan crisis in which Chechen militants took hundreds of schoolchildren hostage.
Poison was mentioned as a possible cause of her symptoms. Politkovskaya survived but was shot to death in the elevator of her apartment building two years later.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent opposition figure, nearly died of kidney failure after a suspected poisoning in 2015 and fell severely ill again in 2017.