Putin foe Navalny sent to prison hospital amid hunger strike

MOSCOW — Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is in the third week of a hunger strike while behind bars, was moved to a hospital in another prison after his doctor said he could be near death, his lawyer said Monday. Therefore, we couldn’t discuss anything, apart from what has happened to him.” The prison service statement said Navalny’s condition was deemed “satisfactory.” But the opposition leader’s physician, Dr. Yaroslav Ashikhmin, said Saturday that test results provided by the family show Navalny has sharply elevated levels of potassium, which can bring on cardiac arrest, as well as heightened creatinine levels that indicate impaired kidney function. Soon after, a court ordered him to serve 2 1/2 years in prison on a 2014 embezzlement conviction that the European Court of Human Rights deemed to be “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.” Navalny began a hunger strike to protest the refusal to let his doctors visit when he began experiencing severe back pain and a loss of feeling in his legs. Ivan Zhdanov, head of the Foundation for Fighting Corruption, tweeted that the transfer takes Navalny merely to another “tormenting colony, just with a big in-patient facility, where gravely ill are being transferred.” Dr. Anastasia Vasilyeva, head of the Navalny-backed Alliance of Doctors union and also his personal physician, noted that it was “not a hospital where a diagnosis can be determined and treatment prescribed for his ailments,” but rather “a prison where tuberculosis is being treated.” She again called for the prison to let her and other physicians see him, but Liptser said that prison officials told Navalny he won’t be allowed a visit from “civilian” doctors. In a wry message Friday from prison, Navalny said authorities threatened to force-feed him “imminently,” using a “straitjacket and other pleasures.” The French newspaper Le Monde on Friday published a letter to Putin signed by dozens of cultural figures — including writers Salman Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa, singer Patti Smith and actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Kristin Scott Thomas — urging him to give Navalny access to proper medical care.