After 24 hours of resistance, doctors at the Omsk hospital have allowed Alexey Navalny to leave their facility for further treatment in Germany. They now say he can leave, but the ready-to-go flight won’t depart until early Friday evening, EDT. The delay represents the tip of the iceberg of an increasingly clear cover-up by Russian authorities.
Navalny, a top Russian investigative journalist and opposition politician, is in a coma after suffering a medical crisis during a flight from the central-southern city of Tomsk to Moscow on Thursday. Eyewitness reports, video from the flight, and the testimony of Navalny’s staff prove that he suffered a sudden and serious illness. His staff believes his tea was poisoned at Tomsk airport. The flight made an emergency landing in Omsk, and Navalny was taken to the hospital in an unconscious state. The Russian state then jumped into action.
Hordes of police officers and plainclothes officials, almost certainly from the local Omsk FSB station, quickly arrived and took control of the hospital. They restricted access to Navalny, also barring his wife. The doctors quickly went silent. They then insisted that Navalny could not be safely moved to a German hospital that had offered to admit him. This contradicted the advice of the team that arrived on a German medical flight. Omsk doctors also falsely claimed that the German doctors agreed with their “don’t move” assessment.
All of this offers rather compelling evidence of a conspiracy. Still, the best evidence that something foul was afoot came from the Omsk hospital director’s report on Friday on his investigation into Navalny’s ailment. “Among these working diagnoses, the main one that we are most inclined towards is a carbohydrate deficiency, that is, a metabolic disease.” The doctor continued, “This could have been caused by a sharp drop in blood sugar on the plane, which caused a loss of consciousness.” Challenging earlier reports from Navalny’s team that he had been poisoned by hallucinogenic nerve agents, the doctor insisted: “We conducted a chemical and toxicological exam of the samples yesterday. I can say for sure that there weren’t any oxybates or barbiturates detected.”
This is pretty ridiculous stuff. The physical symptoms that Navalny showed and that others witnessed do not conform with a blood sugar collapse. But they do comport with poisoning by a high-concentration hallucinogenic nerve agent, such as 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, a series of drugs that are favored by the Russian intelligence services. That would explain, for example, why Navalny was in agony on the plane before he fell unconscious. Affecting the nervous system, nerve agents disrupt the signals between the brain and muscles, causing painful seizures, among other symptoms.
I thus have another suggestion as to why Omsk doctors refused to release Navalny until now. Namely, they wanted to flush out whatever was in his system before transferring him. Hopefully, the German medical team will be able to find some evidence of what truly happened to Navalny. I would also expect, based on the panicked FSB response, that the NSA will get some good evidence of Kremlin officials screaming at their subordinates to get to Omsk and take control of the situation.
Let’s see what happens next.
