Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posted a photo of himself walking a month following his suspected poisoning in Siberia.
Navalny, who spent days in a medically induced coma following the Aug. 20 health scare, said in a Saturday Instagram post that it will be a long journey until he is fully healed from what Germany has deemed an attack.
“Let me tell how my recovery is going. It is already a clear path although a long one,” Navalny said in the post, which included the photo of the anti-corruption activist, who appeared to be gaunt, descending a flight of stairs at the Charite–Universitatsmedizin hospital in Berlin.
“There are many problems yet to be solved but amazing doctors from the Charite hospital have solved the main one,” he continued, according to a translation by the Guardian. “They turned me from a ‘technically alive human being’ into someone who has high chances to become … a man who can quickly scroll Instagram and understands without thinking where to put his likes.”
Officials in Germany concluded that Navalny was poisoned using the Soviet/Russian nerve agent Novichok, the same deadly substance thought to have been used by Russian hit men to target former Soviet double agent Sergei Skripal in 2018.
Navalny became ill and collapsed on a flight in Siberia and was rushed to the hospital in Omsk after the plane made an emergency landing. Russian doctors said they found no evidence of poisoning and initially refused to let the 44-year-old opposition leader leave Russia for treatment in Europe, although he was eventually airlifted to in Berlin for treatment.
European leaders and officials in the United States have demanded accountability. The top leaders on the House Foreign Affairs Committee urged President Trump to initiate an investigation into the incident under the Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot called the poisoning “completely reprehensible” and said that the U.S. is “deeply troubled by the results released” by the Germans about the apparent use of Novichok.
