Aleksei Navalny can die “at any moment”. The alarm comes from the doctors of the Russian dissident, who since March 31 has decided on a hunger strike in the prison where he is being held to ask for adequate medical treatment after the attacks of back pain and numbness of hands and legs that have begun to afflict him.
“His health is rapidly deteriorating,” said Navalny’s personal doctor Anastasia Vasilyeva and three other doctors, including cardiologist Yaroslav Ashikhmin, who asked prison officials to grant them immediate access. “His kidney functions are compromised, and now he risks cardiac arrest: it’s only a matter of days.”
Navalny, 44, was jailed in February and is serving two and a half years, on old embezzlement charges, in a penal colony in the city of Pokrov, about 100 kilometers east of Moscow. Where, among other things, there was an outbreak of tuberculosis. Vladimir Putin’s most famous opponent barely survived a poisoning with nerve agent Novichok in August, for which he has repeatedly blamed the Kremlin. Doctors now claim that his hunger strike may have drastically worsened his condition.
“Alexei is dying,” her spokesperson Kira Yarmysh reiterated on Facebook. Yesterday, the French newspaper Le Monde published the appeal of 70 leading international writers, artists and academics including Jude Law, Vanessa Redgrave and Benedict Cumberbatch, who called on Putin to ensure that Navalny receives adequate treatment immediately.