Doctors have granted permission for Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to be flown out of Siberia to Europe for treatment after initially blocking such travel.
Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic, was hospitalized in Omsk on Thursday after the plane he was in made an emergency landing when he began moaning in pain and fell unconscious. His spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, immediately claimed that Navalny had been poisoned.
Navalny’s team had worked to get him taken to Germany for treatment, but doctors in Russia had blocked the move, drawing suspicions about there being nefarious intentions. The medical officials reversed their decision on Friday after German doctors who flew into Omsk examined Navalny and said he was fit enough to make the flight.
“I understand he’s still unconscious, but they’re used to such special assignments, and they say very clearly he can fly, and they want to fly him,” Jaka Bizilj, a film producer who is part of the group working to evacuate Navalny, told the Associated Press.
The flight out of Siberia is scheduled for Saturday morning local time.
The news of the transfer will be welcomed by Navalny’s family and supporters who have alleged that officials might have been holding him in Russia so that evidence that he was poisoned would not surface. Doctors in Russia claim that they found no evidence of poison. The 44-year-old’s wife Yulia Navalnaya said that he would not receive proper treatment in Russia.
“He is not in a very good state, and we of course cannot trust this hospital, and we demand for Alexei to be given to us, so that we could have him treated in an independent hospital whose doctors we trust,” she said at a news conference.
“We think of course that it is done to make the chemical substance that is in Alexei’s body disappear. That is why he is not given to us, of course, so that the substance residues disappear,” Navalnaya said.
