Navalny’s doctors barred from seeing him at prison
MOSCOW — Several doctors were prevented Tuesday from seeing Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a prison hospital amid his three-week hunger strike, and authorities stepped up actions against his supporters on the eve of protests called by his team.
Navalny was transferred Sunday from a penal colony east of Moscow to a hospital unit at a prison in Vladimir, a city 110 miles east of the capital, after his lawyers and associates said his condition has dramatically worsened.
In a post on his Instagram account, Navalny described a grueling search that lasted for several hours before his transfer and wryly described his condition.
“You would laugh if you see me now — a skeleton staggers around his cell,” the post read. “They can use me to scare children who refuse to eat: ‘If you don’t eat porridge, you will be like that man with big ears, shaven head and hollow eyes.’”
Navalny added a serious note that he was glad to hear from his lawyer about broad sympathy and support for him in Russia and abroad.
His lawyers visited him Tuesday at the hospital unit, which usually treats tuberculosis patients.
One of them, Olga Mikhailovna, said Navalny had been given an IV drip of glucose on Sunday but none since then because paramedics apparently weren’t skilled enough to find a vein.
Navalny looked “extremely exhausted,” she said. “He’s very thin, he must have lost about 44 pounds. He is very weak and appears to have difficulty speaking and sitting.”
His personal physician, Dr. Anastasia Vasilyeva, led three other medical experts to try to visit Navalny at the prison clinic and the IK-3 prison in the city of Vladimir. They were denied entry after waiting hours outside the gates.
“It’s a show of disrespect and mockery of the doctors,” Dr. Vasilyeva tweeted, adding that Navalny’s “life and health are clearly in danger.”
Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most adamant opponent, has been on a hunger strike since March 31 to protest the refusal by prison officials to let his doctors visit him and provide adequate treatment for back pain and numbnessin his legs.
Russia’s penitentiary service insists Navalny was getting all the medical help he needs.
Navalny was arrested in January upon his return from Germany, where he had spent five months convalescing from the Novichok nerve agent poisoning he blames on the Kremlin — an accusation Russian officials have rejected. His arrest triggered the biggest protests seen across Russia in recent years. In
February, a Moscow court ordered him to serve 2½ years in prison on a 2014 embezzlement conviction that the European Court of Human Rights deemed “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.”
The prison service said in a statement Monday that Navalny’s condition was deemed “satisfactory,” but another of his physicians, Dr. Yaroslav Ashikhmin, said over the weekend that test results provided by his family show Navalny has sharply elevated levels of potassium, which can bring on cardiac arrest, as well as heightened creatinine levels that indicate impaired kidney function.
In response to Navalny’s deteriorating health, his associates have called for a nationwide rally Wednesday, the same day Mr. Putin is scheduled to deliver his annual state of the nation address.