Alexei Navalny is sick, isolated in prison, without access to the food and medicine that is sent to him, and those around him fear that he has been poisoned again. He has a mysterious ailment that a spokesman says could be slow poisoning. The Russian opposition leader complains of acute pain with stomach discomfort and his collaborators believe that he could be poisoned just like in 2020.
The Russian prison service has denied ill-treatment in the past but an ambulance had to be called for treatment this weekend. It happened overnight from Friday to Saturday at the IK-6 maximum security prison in Melejovo, some 250 kilometers east of Moscow, where Navalny is serving a sentence for what the opposition considers a politicized trial. As reported by Kira Yarmysh, his spokeswoman, Navalny suffered from severe stomach pain and could not eat the chowder they gave him in prison because it made his pain worse. Since Monday he has been prohibited from buying alternative food in the prison store or receiving packages.
Concern has spread in Navalny's environment. The opposition leader suffered a similar stomach ache in January after being treated with antibiotics for a virus. He had lost a lot of weight again.
In 2020, Navalny survived an attempt to poison him in Siberia. Western laboratory tests determined that what was found in his body was a nerve agent. Navalny accused the Russian state of trying to kill him, something the Kremlin denied, although analysis carried out abroad pointed in that direction. Navalny was treated for that poisoning in Germany but voluntarily returned to Moscow in 2021, where he was arrested upon his arrival and jailed.
Navalny's entourage now denounces that the medicines sent to the prison by his mother were not picked up by prison officials from the post office and were returned. "I am really terrified because nobody knows what is happening," Yarmysh confessed: "Putin has no red lines."
Russia's FSB security service has denounced the alleged involvement of Navalny's anti-corruption foundation, FBK, in the explosion in Saint Petersburg, which killed Russian propagandist Vladlen Tatarsky.
The FSB stated that after the start of the "special operation" in Ukraine, which is how the Russian government intends to call the invasion, "the heads of the extremist organization Anti-Corruption Fund" Ivan Zhdanov and Leonid Volkov repeatedly claimed that in Russia it is necessary to carry out "subversive activities". The FSB, the main successor to the KGB, believes that "as a result" of those words, "on April 2, [the defendant] Daria Trepova committed a terrorist attack."
The director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Ivan Zhdanov, believes that what the authorities are looking for is to increase Alexei Navalny's prison sentence. "I think this will be a kind of separate episode from his case. The FBK being recognized as a terrorist organization, which was also predictable," Zhdanov said on a Telegram channel.
Alexei Navalny has been deprived of his liberty since January 2021. In March 2022 he was again sentenced to nine years in a strict regime prison. In October it was learned that a new case was being opened against the politician for propaganda of terrorism and extremism, financing of extremist activities and rehabilitation of Nazism.
According to Ivan Zhdanov, the FSB version is untenable. And he remembers that as a result of the video recorded moments after the attack "it is clear that the girl did not know that there was a bomb", so she could not act inspired by anyone.
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