The staff of Vladimir Putin’s main political opponent raises the alarm after yet another illness in prison.
A little over two years after his return to Russia, the health conditions of the Russian dissident Alexei Navalnysentenced to 11 years in prison in the maximum security penal colony in Melekhovo, 250 kilometers from Moscow, are once again worrying, perhaps as never before.
The alarm was raised in these hours by his staff who, with great difficulty, carefully monitor what has been happening to Navalny since he was locked up in the Melekhovo facility. Via Twitter and from the pages of the English newspaper The Guardian close associate of Vladimir Putin’s bitter opponent, Ruslan Shaveddinovtold of a worsened clinical picture on Friday, when Navalny would have warned a severe stomach pain.
The ambulance in prison and silence
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For some time, the 46-year-old’s staff has been asking the prison authorities to allow Navalny to be admitted to a hospital due to the worsening of his healthbut the response was always negative. The situation seems to have worsened to the point of having pushed the authorities of the maximum security facility to request the intervention of an ambulancebut no other additional details have yet been provided by Melekhovo prison.
Shaveddinov seems to have no doubts: “Our theory is that they are gradually killing it, using a slow-acting poison through food.” A theory that for obvious reasons finds no confirmation, but the silence of the authorities only fuels the suspicions of people close to Navalny: “He has lost 8 kg in two weeks, this has never happened before and the doctors don’t tell him why he suffers so much”.
The poisoning in 2020
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The health conditions of Alexei Navalny were already proven by thepoisoning with Novichok which he had suffered in August 2020. The dissident, president of the Democratic Coalition who succeeded Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in February 2015, had shown the first symptoms of poisoning while on board an airliner which on 20 August out of three years ago he was taking it from Tomsk to Moscow. Two days later, when the dissident’s conditions now seemed desperate, the intervention of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron allowed the patient to be transported to Germany and admission to a Berlin clinic.
Navalny came out of the induced coma on the following 7 September and thus began the slow recovery of the dissident, while the investigations carried out in Germany confirmed the hypothesis of poisoning by Novichok, a nerve agent that had already been used in 2018 to poison the former spy Sergej Skripal’, also survived the attempted murder.
The return to Russia and the condemnation
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Navalny decided to return to Russia on 17 January 2021, aware that the arrest would have taken place upon his arrival in Russian territory. So it was and from that moment, between a long hunger strike and hospitalization for suspected tuberculosis, Navalny has never found his freedom. Navalny is serving an 11-year prison sentence for fraud and contempt of courtaccusations that according to supporters of the politician and activist, as well as many human rights groups, starting with Amnesty International, were invented by the Russian authorities to silence Navalny and prevent him from continuing to do politics and openly challenge Putin .
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