Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was taken back to prison Monday after being treated for a severe allergic reaction that his lawyer and personal doctor said could be from the result of exposure to a “toxic agent.”
According to his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh, he suffered a “red rash on his face, neck and body and discharge from his eyes” when he was rushed from jail to a nearby hospital. His doctor opposed his transfer back to prison, where he is serving a 30-day jail sentence, because she said he had no known allergies before the incident.
The hospital where Navalny was receiving treatment, however, said he was in “satisfactory condition” and determined his symptoms were probably the result of an allergic reaction to laundry detergent used at the jail.
“He was really poisoned by some unknown chemical substance,” his lawyer, Olga Mikhailova, told reporters. “But what the substance was has not been established.”
Navalny was arrested last week for organizing protests outside Moscow’s City Hall, which saw nearly 1,400 people detained Saturday as police staged a massive crackdown on demonstrators. Protesters were calling for Russian election officials to allow opposition candidates to run in September’s Moscow State Duma elections.
People had gathered for several consecutive weeks before Saturday’s election demonstration to protest the ongoing economic crisis in the country. Many residents have struggled under poor living conditions, and President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings have sunk in recent months. It appears Saturday’s protest was strictly election-related, however.
Moscow Police said around 3,500 protesters turned out for the protest, but aerial surveillance from different locations showed at least 8,000 demonstrators participated.
Several Kremlin-opposing politicians were barred from running in the September elections for allegedly “failing to collect the necessary number of signatures from voters to qualify for the ballot,” according to the Moscow Times. Navalny, who is also an outspoken critic of Putin, was prohibited from participating in the 2018 Russian presidential election which saw Putin get reelected to a second consecutive and fourth overall term as president.
Navalny’s personal ophthalmologist visited him in the hospital where she observed signs of a potential poisoning. She said in an interview with Rain TV that she will send his T-shirt and a hair sample to a lab to run tests in hopes of determining the cause of his allergic reaction.
Navalny was left with only 80% of his eyesight after a chemical attack in 2017 when he was doused with a green-colored antiseptic.
Despite the forceful police response, opposition leaders have planned another protest Saturday as they demand the Kremlin allow independent candidates to run in the upcoming elections.
Human rights groups criticized the police’s violent crackdown on protesters, and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow argued the use of force by law enforcement was “disproportionate.”
Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, alerted protesters that they would be prosecuted for engaging in demonstrations. Some of the opposition politicians who advocated for Saturday’s protests will likely have to endure a future legal battle for obstruction of the election commission’s work by arranging the demonstrations.
