A new danger to Mr. Navalny
Alexei Navalny has an irrepressible spirit. After being sent to a notorious prison recently on trumped-up charges, suffering from an ailment that has caused his right leg to go numb, Mr. Navalny, the leading opposition figure to Russian President Vladimir Putin, said he was asking only for proper medical treatment, not exceptional conditions or gourmet food. “I do not ask the administration of IK-2 to bake pies for me,” he wrote.
But the humor masks a serious and urgent health crisis for Mr. Navalny, and serves to underscore again our alarm that he remains in Mr. Putin’s crosshairs. In August, security service officers tried to kill Mr. Navalny with a Soviet-era military nerve agent. Mr. Navalny’s poisoning brought him close to death; his life was saved only by the brave decision of an airline pilot to make an emergency landing and by the care he received from first responders.
Mr. Navalny, who returned to Russia in January after treatment in Germany for the nerve agent attack, was given a ludicrous sentence of more than 2½ years for a six-year-old conviction that was found to be unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights. He was sent to Penal Colony 2, at the town of Pokrov, in the region east of Moscow, known for its harsh isolation regime.
In a letter addressed to the Russian prison authorities, which was made public Thursday, Mr. Navalny said he has been subject to torturous sleep deprivation, awakened every hour by a guard who photographs him, even though his cell is under constant video surveillance. He said he has also been suffering “acute pain” in his leg, which has lost sensation in some places, and he has difficulty walking, which he described as symptoms of a pinched nerve. A lawyer said he is also suffering back pain.
Mr. Navalny said he has appealed daily for medical examination by a specialist but the prison has ignored his requests. Instead, a prison doctor has given him two tablets of ibuprofen and an ointment. The dissident added that on Wednesday he was given an MRI examination, but was not told the results nor who conducted it. He called the prison’s response to his complaints a “mockery of me.” Mr. Navalny, a lawyer by training, said the prison authorities had violated their own rules with direct intent to harm his health.
We recall the fate of Sergei Magnitsky, the tax law expert who exposed a fraudulent $230 million tax refund obtained by Russian officials using pilfered corporate documents. He died in prison in part because authorities failed to provide him with proper and timely medical treatment. This brutality must not be visited upon Mr. Navalny, who over the past decade has done more than anyone to stand up to the corruption and authoritarianism of the Kremlin. Mr. Putin’s security forces already tried to kill him once. The United States and other democratic nations should make clear that a second attempt would be intolerable.