NAVALNY LEAVES BERLIN HOSPITAL AFTER POISONING
BERLIN » Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, has been released from a hospital in Germany and could make a full recovery from poisoning with a highly toxic nerve agent, doctors said Wednesday, as European leaders wrestled over a response to Moscow.
“Based on the patient’s progress and current condition, the treating physicians believe that complete recovery is possible,” the Charité hospital said Wednesday. “However, it remains too early to gauge the potential long- term effects of his severe poisoning.”
Neither the doctors nor Navalny, 44, who has returned to communicating with his supporters through his Instagram account in recent days, gave any indication of where he would go after his release. But a senior German security official said he would remain under protection in Berlin for rehabilitation.
Navalny arrived at the hospital Aug. 22 after being evacuated by air ambulance from the Siberian city of Omsk, where he had been receiving treatment after collapsing Aug. 20 while aboard a domestic flight to Moscow.
Russia has maintained it played no role in the poisoning of Navalny, although he would not be the first Kremlin enemy to be attacked with a class of Novichok, a Sovietdesigned chemical weapon.
Given the substance used, German authorities and others say there is no doubt that the Russian government was behind the poisoning.
Once Navalny arrived in Berlin, doctors at the Charité hospital placed him in a medically induced coma in the intensive care ward, where he spent 24 days, while also under constant police protection.
Suspecting that their patient was suffering from an agent more complex than what they could detect, they sent samples to their colleagues at the Military Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology in Munich, which found traces of a nerve agent from the Novichok family in Navalny’s blood and urine.