Doctors treating Alexei Navalny for a suspected poisoning have refused to release him for evacuation to a clinic abroad, sparking a standoff with his family and aides who say the Kremlin critic’s life is in danger in Russia.
The hospital’s decision was announced just an hour before a plane was due to arrive to evacuate Navalny to Berlin’s Charité hospital. Navalny is in a coma and on a ventilator in a hospital in the Siberian city of Omsk, after collapsing on a flight on Thursday.
The hospital’s chief doctor, Alexander Murakhovsky, said they did not believe Navalny had been poisoned but declined to name the cause of his sudden illness on Thursday.
Navalny’s press secretary Kira Yarmysh said the decision to delay his evacuation to the European clinic was “an attempt on his life”.
Murakhovsky said Navalny was too sick to be moved, despite saying just hours earlier that his condition had improved. “Anything could happen. Even the worst could happen,” he said.
Later, Murakhovsky said doctors “do not believe that the patient has been poisoned”.
He added: “We have a diagnosis, we have complications … I can’t announce the diagnosis that we have made, but it has been told to his wife and the brother of our patient.”
Navalny supporters have said they believe the hospital is under pressure to delay his transfer to thwart a proper investigation into what caused his sudden illness, which forced pilots to make an emergency landing as he screamed in agony.
“He’s not in a very good condition and we can’t trust this hospital,” Navalny’s wife, Yulia, told journalists at the hospital on Friday morning. “We demand they release him to us so we can treat him in an independent hospital with doctors whom we trust.”
Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said a police official had told him they had found a “deadly substance” in Navalny’s blood, but refused to divulge which one, citing the ongoing investigation.
“This substance presents a risk to the life of not just Alexei, but those around him too,” the police official had said, according to Zhdanov. “Everyone around him should be wearing protective equipment.” Navalny’s team believed hospital officials were stalling for time, possibly until the poison left his system.
If confirmed as a poison attack, it would be the latest in a series of high-profile assaults, often with poison, against opposition figures and Russian dissidents that includes the 2018 poisoning of Sergei Skripal and the 2015 shooting death of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov.
A plane left Nuremberg with a medical team in the early hours of Friday and, according to German media, would head to Omsk before returning to Berlin with Navalny, where the Charité hospital was ready to treat him.
Jaka Bizilj, the founder of the German NGO Cinema for Peace Foundation, told the newspaper Bild: “The plane is in the air, we have all the necessary paper and hope that Alexei is ready for transport tomorrow morning so that we can fly to Berlin.”
The Kremlin had earlier signalled it would authorise the evacuation, despite bans on direct flights to EU countries due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said he would, if asked, help facilitate Navalny’s transfer for treatment abroad. Navalny supporters appealed to him on Thursday evening.
Yarmysh, the press secretary to Navalny, earlier voiced fears hospital officials could obstruct the process of taking the prominent critic of the president, Vladimir Putin, abroad.
In a video statement released on Thursday night, she said: “We ask the management of the hospital where Alexei is lying now not to obstruct us in obtaining all the documents necessary for his transfer.”
Navalny was flying from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow on Thursday when he suddenly fell ill and lost consciousness, prompting the captain to make an emergency landing in Omsk. Mobile video shot on the plane showed medical personnel rushing onboard as Navalny screamed.
The suspected poisoning has attracted global attention. The White House national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, said the news was “extraordinarily concerning” and could affect US-Russia relations.
“He’s a very courageous man. He is a very courageous politician to have stood up to Putin inside Russia, and our thoughts and our prayers are with him and his family,” O’Brien told Fox News. “If the Russians were behind this … it’s something that we’re going to factor into how we deal with the Russians going forward.”
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, joined the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in expressing concern over Navalny’s condition and said he could receive treatment in Germany or France.
“I hope that he can recover and naturally whether it be in France or in Germany he can receive from us all the help and medical support needed,” Merkel said in a joint news conference with Macron.
Peskov had wished Navalny a “speedy recovery” and said claims of poisoning were “only assumptions” until tests proved otherwise.
