Hunger-striking Navalny to go to prison hospital: Officials

Navalny went on hunger strike in prison to protest the refusal to let his doctors visit

MOSCOW (AP) — Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is in the third week of a hunger strike while behind bars, will be admitted to a hospital in another prison, the Russian state penitentiary service said Monday, after the politician’s doctor said he could be near death.

The prison service, FSIN, also said that Navalny had agreed to take vitamin therapy, but an ally of the 44-year-old Kremlin critic cast doubt on that and the hospital transfer, saying his lawyers should confirm both.

The service said in a statement that Navalny would be transferred from a penal colony just east of Moscow to a hospital for convicts in a prison in Vladimir, a city 180 kilometers (110 miles) from the capital. According to the statement, Navalny’s condition is deemed “satisfactory.”

But the opposition leader’s physician, Dr. Yaroslav Ashikhmin, said Saturday that test results provided by the family show Navalny has sharply elevated levels of potassium, which can bring on cardiac arrest, and heightened creatinine levels that indicate impaired kidneys. “Our patient could die at any moment,” he said in a Facebook post.

Reports about Navalny’s rapidly declining health elicited international outrage and calls urging Russian authorities to provide the politician with adequate medical help. European Union foreign ministers were assessing the bloc’s strategy toward Russia on Monday in wake of the news about his health.

Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest opponent, was arrested in January upon his return from Germany, where he had spent five months recovering from a nerve agent poisoning he blames on the Kremlin — accusations Russian officials have rejected. Navalny’s arrest triggered a massive wave of protests all across Russia, the biggest show of defiance in recent years. Soon after, a court ordered him to serve 2 1/2 years in prison on a 2014 embezzlement conviction that the European Court of Human Rights deemed to be “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.”

Navalny went on hunger strike in prison to protest the refusal to let his doctors visit when he began experiencing severe back pain and a loss of feeling in his legs. Russia’s state penitentiary service has said that Navalny was receiving all the medical help he needs.

In response to the alarming news about Navalny’s health this weekend, his team has called for a nationwide rally on Wednesday, the same day that Putin is scheduled to deliver his annual state of the nation address. According to a website dedicated to the protests, as of Monday afternoon demonstrations were being planned in 77 Russian cities.

Russia’s Interior Ministry on Monday issued a statement urging Russians not to take part in unauthorized rallies, citing coronavirus risks and alleging that some “destructive-minded” participants might provoke unrest. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that police will treat any unauthorized protests as illegal.

Several Navalny allies dismissed the move announced by the prison service as insufficient. Navalny’s top strategist, Leonid Volkov, said no one should assume it was happening until the opposition leader’s lawyers confirm it. The lawyers were en route to the prison where the hospital is, Volkov said.

“Until the lawyers locate him, we won’t know where he is and what is up with him,” Volkov wrote in a Facebook post.

Ivan Zhdanov, the head of Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption, tweeted Monday that the transfer would take the politician merely to another “tormenting colony, just with a big in-patient facility, where gravely ill are being transferred.”

Dr. Anastasia Vasilyeva, head of the Navalny-backed Alliance of Doctors union and also the politician’s personal physician, noted that it was “not a hospital where a diagnosis can be determined and treatment (can be) prescribed for his ailments,” but rather “a prison where tuberculosis is being treated.”

She again called for the prison to let her and other physicians see him.

Since last month, the politician has been serving his sentence in a penal colony notorious for its harsh conditions.

Navalny has complained about being sleep-deprived because guards conduct hourly checks on him at night, and said he developed severe back pain and numbness in his legs within weeks of being transferred to the colony. His demands for a visit from an independent “civilian” physician were rebuffed by prison officials, and he went on hunger strike on March 31.

In a message from prison on Friday, Navalny said prison officials threatened to force-feed him “imminently,” using “straitjacket and other pleasures.”

Over the weekend, the French newspaper Le Monde published a letter to Putin signed by dozens of prominent cultural figures — including writers Salman Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa, singer Patti Smith and actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Kristin Scott Thomas — calling for giving Navalny access to proper medical care.

On Monday, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja MijatoviÄ