Poisoned critic of Putin posts sickbed photo
BERLIN — Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader recovering in Berlin after being poisoned, posted a photograph Tuesday showing him in the hospital, looking gaunt but very much alive, and telling followers that he was breathing on his own.
“Hello, it’s Navalny,” he said in an Instagram post with a picture of himself sitting up in a hospital bed surrounded by his wife and other relatives. “I can still do almost nothing, but yesterday I could breathe the entire day by myself.”
“I recommend it,” he said with characteristic irony.
The message came hours after a senior German security official said that Navalny was awake, alert and had told German judiciary officials that he was refusing to cooperate with a Russian inquiry into his case. He also vowed, according to the official, to return to Russia as soon as possible to continue his work.
Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, confirmed Tuesday that Navalny planned to return to Russia.
“It’s strange to me that anyone could think otherwise,” Yarmysh said on Twitter. “No other options are being considered.”
Navalny’s return to health, as well as to social media, has the potential to reenergize Russia’s opposition after nearly a month of uncertainty since he first fell ill Aug. 20.
The most persistent critic of President Vladimir Putin, Navalny collapsed on a flight to Moscow after spending several days meeting with opposition candidates in Novosibirsk, a Siberian industrial hub that is Russia’s thirdlargest city. His plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, another Siberian city, where he was first hospitalized. He was flown to Berlin two days later.
Navalny had been campaigning in Siberia before the nationwide municipal elections that took place Sunday. He and his allies made enough gains to cost Putin’s party, United Russia, its majority on the City Council in Novosibirsk.
Senior Russian officials, largely silent in the aftermath of the poisoning, appeared in public Tuesday to discuss the case. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, held a news conference, as did Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service.
Both men denounced accusations of Russian involvement and insinuated, without evidence, that Germany was somehow implicated in the poisoning.
With the opposition leader seemingly out of danger, attention is likely to shift to the Western response to Russia. German officials now say they have almost no doubt that the Russian state was behind the poisoning of Navalny.
The German government said Monday that laboratories in France and Sweden had confirmed that the substance used to poison Navalny was a form of the nerve agent Novichok. The results match Berlin’s own findings and provide additional confidence of state involvement, as Western intelligence agencies have assessed that only the Russian government was likely to have access to such a weapon.