The family and allies of comatose Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has been in a coma for a day, were fighting Friday to get him flown to a top German medical facility from a Siberian hospital but local doctors refused to authorize the transfer.
After much wrangling, German doctors were being allowed access to him, an associate said.
Navalny, a 44-year-old politician and corruption investigator who is one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's fiercest critics, was admitted to an intensive care unit in a coma in the Siberian city of Omsk on Thursday, following what his supporters are calling a suspected poisoning that they believe was engineered by the Kremlin.
A plane with German specialists and all the necessary equipment landed at Omsk airport on Friday morning, prepared to take Navalny to a top clinic in Berlin. But doctors at the hospital said his condition was too unstable to transport him.
Navalny's supporters denounced the medical verdict as a ploy by the authorities to stall and wait until the suspected poison no longer is traceable in his system. But a chief doctor in Omsk said the physicians who are treating Navalny didn't believe the patient suffered from poisoning.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he wasn't aware of any instructions to stop the transfer and that it was purely a medical decision that doctors made based on Navalny's condition.
It may pose a threat to his health, Peskov said.
Leonid Volkov, a close associated of Navalny, said Friday that German doctors now have access to him.
The German doctors who came on this flight, from Nuremberg, who were refused to get access to this patient finally just got access to him several minutes ago, Volkov said during a news conference in Berlin.
Volkov said even though that was good news, Navalny's family and allies were still lacking any reliable independent data on his condition and were standing by their demand that he needs to be brought to Germany for examination.
We are still very far away from having this situation resolved, he said.
Navalny fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk on Thursday and was taken to the hospital after the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk.
His team made arrangements to transfer him to Charit, a clinic in Berlin that has a history of treating famous foreign leaders or dissidents and insisted that the transfer is paramount to saving the politician's life.
The ban on transferring Navalny is needed to stall and wait until the poison in his body can no longer be traced. Yet every hour of stalling creates a threat to his life, Yarmysh tweeted.
