POISONED PUTIN CRITIC FIGHTS FOR LIFE
... and is this moment he drank toxic tea before boarding jet?
A HIGH-profile critic of Vladimir Putin screamed in agony after drinking a suspected poisoned cup of tea, witnesses said yesterday.
Alexei Navalny, 44, was in a coma last night after he collapsed on a flight.
The Russian anti- corruption campaigner – who was also allegedly poisoned last year – had earlier been pictured sipping from a takeaway cup at a café in a terminal in Siberia.
He ‘sharply deteriorated’ shortly after takeoff, with footage shot by a passenger showing him groaning. After the plane made an emergency landing, he was put into an ambulance on a stretcher. Mr Navalny – who had accused Putin of orchestrating a ‘coup’ to cling on to power – was last night unconscious on a ventilator in the city of Omsk.
It is the latest in a long line of suspected poisonings of Kremlin opponents and comes two years after ex-Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, survived being attacked with novichok in Salisbury. Pavel Lebedev, who was also on the S7 Airlines flight that Mr Navalny took from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow, said: ‘At the start of the flight [Mr Navalny] went to the toilet and didn’t come back. He started feeling really sick. ‘They struggled to bring him round and he was screaming in pain.’
The airline said he had not eaten or drunk anything onboard. Kira Yarmysh, of the AntiCorruption Foundation, which Mr Navalny founded in 2011, said: ‘Alexei has toxic poisoning. We suspect that Alexei was poisoned by something mixed into (his) tea. It was the only thing he drank since morning.
‘Doctors are saying that the toxic agent is absorbed faster through the hot liquid.’
She told the Echo Moskvy radio station that Mr Navalny had been sweating and asked her to talk to him so that he could ‘focus on a sound of a voice’, before going to the bathroom and losing consciousness. Miss Yarmysh added that Mr Navalny’s wife Yulia had flown from Moscow to
‘Absorbed faster in hot liquid’
see him but doctors stopped her because she did not have her marriage certificate. They were also refusing to discharge him so that he could be flown to Europe for emergency treatment, she said.
Miss Yarmysh added that Putin was responsible, saying: ‘Whether or not he gave the order personally, the blame lies with him.’
Putin last night wished his rival ‘a speedy recovery’. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there was no evidence he was poisoned, adding: ‘Assumptions are only assumptions.’
Mr Navalny has previously described Putin’s United Russia as ‘the party of crooks and thieves’. He had been putting forward opposition candidates in regional elections, challenging members of Putin’s party.
In June he described a vote on reforms which allow Putin to serve another two terms in office as a ‘coup’ and a ‘violation of the constitution’. In 2011 he was jailed for 15 days following protests over vote-rigging.
He was briefly jailed again in 2013 over embezzlement charges he denounced as politically-motivated, and was barred from standing in the 2018 presidential race over his convictions. Last year Mr Navalny fell ill with suspected poisoning while serving a 30-day jail term after calling for unauthorised protests. He was admitted to hospital but diagnosed with ‘ contact dermatitis’ and discharged back to prison the next day. Mr Navalny, who has previously acknowledged his political activities could lead to attempts on his life, also suffered a chemical burn to his right eye in 2017 after he was assaulted with antiseptic green dye.
Last week he was accused of stirring mass protests in Belarus by the country’s authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, whose landslide election victory was marred by accusations of vote-rigging.
Anatoly Kalinichenko, deputy head physician of Hospital No1 in Omsk where Mr Navalny is being treated, said yesterday it was not certain he had been poisoned, although ‘natural poisoning’ was one diagnosis being considered. He said doctors were ‘genuinely trying to save his life’.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said he was ‘ deeply concerned’ and his thoughts were with Mr Navalny.
The widow of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian agent killed in London by radioactive poisoning in 2006, said of Mr Navalny: ‘It was obvious he would not be stopped. Maybe they decided to do a new tactic not to stop him just with an arrest but to stop him with poison.’