Opponent’s doctor forbids seeing patient on hunger strike

Turned back at the entrance. Several doctors including Alexeï Navalny’s personal doctor were turned away Tuesday morning at the entrance to the penal colony where he is hospitalized. The Russian opponent, who began a hunger strike three weeks ago, is in a hospital prison unit in Vladimir, northeast of Moscow. His relatives have said since this weekend that he risks dying at any time.

Alexeï Navalny’s personal doctor and leader of an opposition union Anastasia Vassilieva, said she was unable to meet her patient on Tuesday, like all the times she has tried since her imprisonment in early March. “It is a kind of very disrespectful attitude for people who had just come to exercise their human duty, the medical duty to help a patient”, she declared in front of the colony, adding that there was question ” of the life ”of the number one opponent of Vladimir Putin. However, Alexeï Navalny’s lawyers were able to enter the prison.

Angela Merkel “extremely concerned”

Western pressure for his release remains strong, with Chancellor Angela Merkel saying she is “extremely concerned” and claiming that the German government “is working to ensure he receives proper medical care”.

Alexeï Navalny stopped eating on March 31 to protest against his conditions of detention, accusing the prison administration of refusing him a visit from a doctor when he suffers from a double herniated disc and loss of sensitivity to the legs and arms.

Sentenced to two and a half years in prison

He was arrested in January, as soon as he returned to Russia after five months of convalescence in Germany for a poisoning for which he personally accuses Vladimir Putin. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for a fraud case dating back to 2014, which is generally considered politically motivated.

The Russian prison services assured Monday by announcing his hospitalization that the state of health of Alexey Navalny was “satisfactory”, an announcement immediately questioned by his relatives and by the European Union.

Transferred “to a concentration and torture camp”

A relative, Leonid Volkov, estimated that he had been transferred “to a concentration and torture camp and not to the hospital”, specifying that Alexeï Navalny had been there since Sunday. His mother Lioudmila, for her part, estimated on Instagram that the new colony where he is hospitalized is “worse” than the previous one.

The NGO Amnesty International considered that this transfer was “a punishment disguised as medical treatment”, because the authorities were preparing “to force-feed him to break his hunger strike and punish him again”.

Russian authorities “responsible” for his health

The fate of the opponent, and more generally relations between Brussels and Moscow, was on the program of a meeting of foreign ministers on Monday, while Western countries raised their tone against Moscow. EU chief diplomat Josep Borrell thus made the Russian authorities “responsible” for his health, as did later British foreign minister Dominic Raab.

For its part, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) sent questions to Moscow on the conditions of detention of the anti-corruption activist, worrying to know if they were “compatible with his right to life “. Right in its boots, Moscow continues to denounce Western criticism as interference. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said these criticisms “could not be accepted”.

Protests on the day of Putin’s big annual speech

Supporters of the 44-year-old opponent also called for protests across Russia on Wednesday, the day of Vladimir Putin’s big annual speech. The Interior Ministry warned that it would not allow any “destabilization” and that it would take “all the necessary measures”. The prosecution wants him to ban Alexeï Navalny’s movement, the Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK), for “extremism”.

Doctors close to the opponent had said on Saturday that they feared he would go into cardiac arrest “from one minute to the next”, deeming “critical” the concentration of potassium in his blood.