Months after his reported poisoning at the hands of Russian KGB agents, opposition leader Alexei Navalny is reportedly ill again—this time after being interned in a high-security prison in Russia’s Vladimir region.
Allies of Navalny, who have been orchestrating protests across Russia demanding his release, are “really worried” over his health after it was reported that he was suffering from “serious back pain” and dizziness.
Russian prison officials released a terse statement about Navalny’s health, saying, “His health is deemed stable and satisfactory, according to the results of the examination,” Interfax news agency quoted them as saying.
“Now we are really worried,” Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation wrote on Twitter. “Even the Federal Penitentiary Service can’t call Navalny’s condition `good’.”
Navalny’s stint in prison came as he arrived in Russia months after he was reportedly poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok while travelling from Siberia. The deadly nerve agent nearly took his life, and he was revived only after being airlifted to Germany where he spent weeks in hospital. German hospital authorities confirmed that he had been poisoned with Novichok, and Navalny later conducted a sting operation on a FSB agent that got him a verbal confession of “what went wrong” in the attempt to poison him. The FSB denied the video of Navalny’s conversation as being “fake”.
After returning to Russia, Navalny was jailed for two and a half years in relation to what he called “politically motivated” charges of corruption, related to which he was convicted of violating the terms of his parole. The European Court of Human Rights has demanded his release.
Nearly 160 cultural figures, including writers, musicians and film directors, published an open letter to the authorities on Thursday demanding Navalny’s lawyers be given access to him and that he be held in normal conditions, Reuters reported.
They said they had “serious grounds to be concerned about his health and life”.
The penal colony Navalny was interned in is notorious for its cruel treatment of prisoners.
