[ad_1]
Russia’s penitentiary service said Monday it had transferred jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny to a prison hospital after supporters warned his condition had worsened for nearly three weeks in a hunger strike.
Navalny, 44, was taken to a facility that “specializes in dynamic care for similar patients” and is in a “satisfactory state” under the daily supervision of a doctor, the Penitentiary Service reported. Federal in a statement. He agreed to take vitamins, he added.
Supporters of the anti-corruption activist say his life is “hanging by a thread” from elevated creatine levels that can lead to kidney failure, as well as life-threatening potassium levels that could cause cardiac arrest at “any time.”
Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic, went on hunger strike last month in protest of prison conditions, which he compared to “torture.”
Counselors have refused to let him see a doctor he has chosen for severe nerve pain from two herniated discs in his back. After the hunger strike began, Navalny claimed that councilors began ironing chicken in his presence and putting candy in his pockets to tease him.
Ivan Zhdanov, the head of the Navalny Anti-Corruption Foundation, said in a tweet that the prison hospital was “also a torture camp, with only a large medical room where the seriously ill were transferred. The only way to “It’s understandable that Navalny’s condition has worsened. So much so that even a torture camp admits it.”
Navalny’s health has deteriorated as the Kremlin seems increasingly determined to crush his movement. His supporters are organizing what they hope will be Russia’s biggest protests by Wednesday, when Putin will deliver his annual speech on the state of the nation.
On Monday, the attorney general’s office said it would accuse social media companies of failing to remove calls for protest from their platforms and punish parents of minors who attended.
Russia’s Interior Ministry asked people to avoid protests. “Any aggressive action by participants in unapproved public events. . . it will be treated as a threat to public safety and immediately repealed, “he said in a statement.
State prosecutors said last week they would propose declaring Navalny’s organization “extremist,” equating it with Islamist terrorist groups and exposing its supporters to charges of up to 10 years in prison. Most of the group’s top management are in exile or under house arrest, while police have detained several pro-Navalny activists across Russia in recent weeks.
Navalny was arrested in January immediately after returning from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve agent poisoning that blamed Putin. The Kremlin, which claims Navalny is a U.S. agent with the intent to destroy Russia, has denied any involvement in the poisoning and has suggested that Navalny invented it himself to make Putin look bad.
EU foreign ministers planned to discuss Navalny’s health at a meeting on Monday. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said in a tweet on Sunday that she was “deeply concerned” about Navalny’s health and called for “her immediate and unconditional release”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia “did not pay [attention] in any case ”in Western demands the release of Navalny.
“The president cannot make any decision on monitoring the health of prisoners,” Peskov said, according to Interfax news agency. “I have no information about the health of the prisoner in question and therefore I cannot rely on your claims about his alleged critical condition.”
[ad_2]
Source link
