The wife of pro-democracy activist Alexei Navalny, who lies in a coma in a Siberian hospital after drinking tea his aides allege was poisoned, has asked Russian president Vladimir Putin to allow her husband to be treated in Germany. The same day, one of the Russian doctors in care of Navalny in the far-East city of Omsk said he “didn’t believe” that Navalny’s condition was due to poisoning but rather to a “metabolic disease” triggered by low blood sugar.
• The refusal of Russian doctors to let him be transported to Germany, even as a special German plane had been sent to Omsk to take him back to one of the country’s specialized facilities, was attributed by Navalny aides to Kremlin pressure, and seen as a deliberate attempt to wait until no trace of poison could be found in his body.
• French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel jointly expressed on Thursday their “concerns” over Navalny’s fate, and asked that a proper investigation be conducted on the reasons he fell ill. Merkel said she was deeply upset by the incident, and Macron even tweeted France was ready to grant Navalny political asylum and “protection.” Both leaders reiterated their willingness to see Navalny examined and treated by French or German specialists.
• Navalny, 44, was flying from Tomsk to Moscow on Thursday when he fell violently ill, forcing his plane to make an emergency landing in nearby Omsk shortly after takeoff.
• “We assume that Alexei was poisoned with something mixed in his tea; it was the only thing he drank all morning,” spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh tweeted. A doctor at the Omsk hospital confirmed that Navalny was in a “serious condition.” A Kremlin spokesman later told the Tass news agency that Russian law enforcement would launch an investigation “if poisoning took place.”
• A lawyer by training and a hugely popular blogger, Navalny did several stints in jail for having taken part in demonstrations against the Putin regime in the last 10 years. He built a massive following with his investigations of corruption among high-level government officials, and was banned from running in the 2018 Russian presidential elections.
• Russia is due to hold nationwide local elections, when voters will notably choose their regions’ governors, on Sept. 13.
• Several opponents to Putin have been poisoned, murdered or died in suspicious circumstances over the years, such as journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006 and the former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov in 2015. The U.K. government has also accused the Kremlin of trying to poison former KGB agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, in 2018. Moscow has always denied involvement in those deaths and incidents.
• U.K. foreign secretary Dominic Raab said on Thursday that he was “deeply concerned” by reports that Navalny had been poisoned and lay in intensive care.
See:Watch this BBC reporter straight-up ask Putin if Russia poisoned ex-spy Skripal
The outlook: If confirmed, Navalny’s poisoning will weigh on the talks between Putin and European leaders over the situation in Belarus, where protesters continue to demand the cancellation of the Aug. 9 presidential election that gave strongman Alexander Lukashenko a new term in office.
Public uproar in Europe would make it more difficult for European Union governments to reach a deal with Putin on the matter. Already, the fate of the Russian opponent was as prominent during the conversation Macron and Merkel held in the south of France on Thursday as the situation in Belarus.
As often, it is hard to understand why the Kremlin would go to such lengths against its opponents, especially a few weeks after Putin won a constitutional referendum to allow him to rule until 2036.
Read more: Putin pledges ‘assistance’ to Belarus — but he has many good reasons to stay out
