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Aleksei Navalny Hospitalized in Russia in Suspected Poisoning Aleksei Navalny Hospitalized in Russia in Suspected Poisoning
(about 7 hours later)
MOSCOW — Groaning in agony from a suspected poisoning before losing consciousness, the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny was rushed to a Siberian hospital on Thursday after the plane he was flying on made an emergency landing because of his sudden illness. MOSCOW — Booked on an early morning flight back to Moscow, Aleksei A. Navalny began his day with a rushed breakfast — just a cup of tea in a plastic cup — at the airport in the Siberian city of Tomsk. Soon after his flight took off Thursday, he rushed to the toilet feeling violently ill.
Doctors at the No. 1 Clinical Hospital in Omsk, the Siberian city where the plane landed, initially said that Mr. Navalny, a fierce critic of President Vladimir V. Putin, was on a ventilator in “serious condition” but later reported that his condition, though still grave, had stabilized. Just a few hundred miles into its nearly 2,000-mile flight, the plane made an emergency landing, and Mr. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, groaning in agony before losing consciousness, was taken on a gurney to an ambulance waiting on the tarmac.
Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told journalists that the Kremlin wished Mr. Navalny a swift recovery, “as we would for any citizen of Russia,” and would, if asked, provide help to get the opposition leader transferred to a hospital abroad. Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, who was traveling with him, announced on Twitter that he had been poisoned, probably by something put in his tea at the airport’s Vienna Café. Mr. Navalny, who has often described President Vladimir V. Putin as the leader of a “party of crooks and thieves,” had traveled to Siberia to help organize opposition candidates ahead of local elections next month.
Mr. Navalny, who often refers to Mr. Putin as the head of “a party of crooks and thieves,” is the latest in a long line of Kremlin opponents to be suddenly afflicted by bizarre and sometimes fatal medical emergencies. The Kremlin and its supporters have for years regarded him as an enemy because of the investigations he has led into graft by officials — including, most vividly, the former prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev. Mr. Navalny has been harassed and jailed numerous times for short periods, but the authorities have, until now, refrained from harsher steps that could elevate his national profile. Doctors at the No. 1 Clinical Hospital in Omsk, the Siberian city where the plane made its emergency landing, initially said that Mr. Navalny was on a ventilator in serious condition. It later reported that his condition, though still grave, had stabilized.
Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, who was traveling with the anticorruption campaigner on a flight destined for Moscow from Tomsk, said on Twitter, “We assume that Aleksei was poisoned with something mixed with his tea.” As alarm that Mr. Navalny might die receded, speculation of foul play escalated, particularly after his personal physician and fellow opposition activist, Anastasia Vasilyeva, arrived at the hospital in Omsk only to be denied access to his medical records and the intensive care ward where he was being treated.
Pavel Lebedev, a passenger who posted a picture of Mr. Navalny drinking tea at the airport before departure, said on Instagram that the opposition activist “went to the toilet at the beginning of the flight and didn’t return. He started feeling very bad. They could barely revive him and he’s still crying out in pain.” “Nobody is allowed in to see Aleksei Navalny, or to see his medical records,” Ms. Vasiliyeva, who flew to Tomsk with the opposition leader’s wife, Yulia, wrote in a Twitter post. Ms. Vasiliyeva, an optometrist, treated Mr. Navalny for severe eye burns after an unidentified assailant in 2017 threw a green chemical liquid in his face.
Videos posted by Russian news outlets showed an apparently unconscious Mr. Navalny being wheeled on a gurney to an ambulance waiting on the tarmac at the Omsk airport. Ms. Yarmysh, his spokeswoman, said Thursday evening that Mr. Navalny’s wife had finally been allowed into his ward but that documents needed to fly him out of Omsk to a hospital elsewhere had still not been provided.
The state-owned news agency Tass quoted an unidentified law enforcement source as saying that the authorities were not yet considering the possibility of a deliberate poisoning. It said that Mr. Navalny could have “taken something himself” before boarding the plane. The Berlin-based movie producer, Jaka Bizilj, said his foundation was flying an air ambulance to Omsk and hoped to bring Mr. Navalny back to a Berlin hospital, Charité. Mr. Bizilj did the same in 2018 after a poisoning of a member of the Russian group Pussy Riot, who turned to Mr. Bizilj for help.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France, meeting in France, offered their assistance, including medical help and possible asylum. “What urgently needs to be clarified is how this situation came about,” Ms. Merkel said.
The Kremlin said earlier that it would, if asked, help facilitate Mr. Navalny’s transfer, but this did not calm suspicions that the authorities wanted to delay his departure to prevent his being seen by foreign doctors more likely to identify poison if any remained in his system.
While the Kremlin insisted Thursday that it was too early to say what had happened to its best known and most persistent critic, it was already clear by the end of the day that Mr. Navalny had joined a long list of Mr. Putin’s opponents to be suddenly afflicted by bizarre and sometimes fatal medical emergencies, often after drinking tea.
Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist and fierce critic of the Kremlin, fell gravely ill in 2004 after drinking tea on an another domestic flight. She recovered from what she believed was poisoning, only to be shot dead two years later in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment. While five men were given lengthy prison sentences for the murder, investigators never identified who ordered the killing.
A month after her murder, a renegade former intelligence officer, Aleksandr V. Litvinenko died an agonizing death in a London hospital after sipping tea laced with a rare and lethal radioactive isotope, polonium 210. A British investigation concluded in 2016 that he had been the victim of a hit by Russia’s secret service that had probably been personally approved by Mr. Putin.
In 2015, another opposition activist, Vladimir Kara-Murza, fell into a weeklong coma in Moscow and later said he believed he had ingested poison on an Aeroflot flight. Mr. Kara-Murza said he was poisoned a second time, in 2017, while traveling in Russia to show a documentary about another Russian politician, Boris Y. Nemtsov, who had been shot and killed two years earlier on a Moscow bridge just yards from the Kremlin.
The Kremlin and its supporters have long detested Mr. Navalny because of the investigations he has led into graft by officials — including, most vividly, the former prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev. Mr. Navalny has been harassed and jailed numerous times for short periods, but the authorities have refrained from harsher steps that could elevate his national profile.
Last year, after his arrest for leading an unauthorized protest in Moscow, Mr. Navalny fell so ill while in jail that he had to be hospitalized for a mysterious “severe allergic reaction.” A generally healthy 44-year-old, he has no history of allergies and many, including Ms. Vasilyeva, suspected poison then, too.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, told journalists that a decision on whether to open a criminal investigation into the cause of Mr. Navalny’s latest bout of sudden ill health would depend on the doctors’ diagnosis. Talk of poisoning, he said, was “just speculation.”
But so many Russians at odds with the Kremlin have fallen gravely ill over the years — and so few criminal attacks on opposition figures, whether with bullets or poison, have been solved — that virtually nobody expects Russia’s law enforcement system to delve deeply into what happened to Mr. Navalny even if there is an investigation.
Within a few hours of Mr. Navalny being rushed to the hospital in Omsk, there were already signs that his illness would be quickly enveloped in a fog of disinformation and wild conspiracy theories — the Kremlin’s response to nearly all potentially embarrassing scandals.
Pro-Kremlin news outlets quickly began pumping out alternative and apparently fictitious explanations for Mr. Navalny’s ordeal: a drug overdose; heavy drinking the night before; the side effects of anti-depressants; a botched medical treatment in the West.
Tass, the state-owned news agency, quoted an unidentified law enforcement source as saying that the authorities were not yet considering the possibility of a deliberate poisoning. It said that Mr. Navalny could have “taken something himself” before boarding the plane.
Ms. Yarmysh, Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman, responded on Twitter by asking, “If law enforcement agencies are not looking into intentional poisoning, why are there so many cops in the hospital?”Ms. Yarmysh, Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman, responded on Twitter by asking, “If law enforcement agencies are not looking into intentional poisoning, why are there so many cops in the hospital?”
Anatoly Kalinichenko, a doctor at the Omsk hospital who was interviewed by state television, said poisoning was being considered as a possible cause of Mr. Navalny’s sudden illness. A news agency linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, an associate of Mr. Putin from St Petersburg who controls a network of media outlets known for disinformation, reported that Mr. Navalny probably fell ill because he was a drug addict. There is no evidence that Mr. Navalny uses drugs.
Yaroslav Ashikhmin, a cardiologist who has served as Mr. Navalny’s personal doctor, told Meduza, a Russian news outlet, that he was trying to get the opposition leader flown from Omsk to a hospital in either Hanover, Germany, or Strasbourg, France, with more experienced toxicology specialists.
Toxicology, he said, is a very specialized field and there are very few institutions that can “handle a patient who has probably been poisoned by some kind of toxin.” Mr. Navalny was traveling in Siberia on one of his regular trips to far-flung regions in an effort to expand Russia’s weak, Moscow-centric opposition movement.
He said he had not seen Mr. Navalny since the latest illness so he could not say whether poison was the cause, but, he added, “it looks like it.” Before boarding his flight in Tomsk on Thursday, he met with opposition candidates in a coming election for the local council. He arrived there from Novosibirsk, Siberia’s largest city, where he had met with his supporters and discussed plans to field independent candidates in a city council election next month.
Mr. Navalny was traveling in Siberia on one of his regular trips to far-flung regions in an effort to expand Russia’s weak and often Moscow-centric opposition movement beyond the capital. Mr. Navalny, like many other Kremlin critics, has rejoiced at the recent unrest in neighboring Belarus and in Khabarovsk in Russia’s Far East, seeing a sudden burst of protests in those previously somnolent places as a sign that Moscow, too, will emerge from its long, enforced political slumber under Mr. Putin, now in power for more than two decades.
Before boarding his flight in Tomsk on Thursday, Mr. Navalny met with opposition candidates in a coming election for the local council. He arrived in Tomsk from Novosibirsk, Siberia’s largest city, where he had met with his supporters and discussed plans to field independent candidates in a city council election next month. Mr. Navalny announced plans to run against Mr. Putin in the 2018 presidential election, but the authorities blocked his candidacy by entangling him in a criminal case involving corruption charges widely seen as trumped-up.
A Siberian news outlet, Taiga, reported that Mr. Navalny had also filmed an investigative report for his Anti-Corruption Foundation on local officials affiliated with United Russia, a Kremlin-backed political party that dominates most regional parliaments in Russia as well as the national Parliament. Mr. Putin would almost certainly have won any election against Mr. Navalny, but a head-to-head contest would have forced him to acknowledge the existence of a rival with different ideas. Each assault on Mr. Navalny’s person and reputation, however, has only stirred sympathy and reaffirmed his position as the country’s best known opposition leader.
Last year, Mr. Navalny was hospitalized with a “severe allergic reaction” in jail, which his doctor at the time suggested could have been the result of a poisoning, after he was detained for leading an unauthorized election protest. Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris, and Melissa Eddy from Berlin.
He had been arrested and sentenced to 30 days in jail for calling a rally to protest a decision by the election authorities to bar several opposition candidates from running for Moscow’s City Council.
Mr. Navalny was doused with a bright green liquid in the Siberian city of Barnaul in 2017 by an unknown assailant who had pretended to shake his hand.
Mr. Navalny later said that a doctor had told him he lost 80 percent of the sight in one eye after suffering a chemical burn from the green liquid.
While there was no independent confirmation that Mr. Navalny had been poisoned before falling ill on Thursday, the Russian security services have been suspected of targeting a number of dissidents and others before. Among those are Sergei V. Skripal, a former Russian double agent who was poisoned in England in 2018; Boris Y. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister who in 2015 was gunned down in the shadow of the Kremlin; and Alexander V. Litvinenko, a K.G.B. officer turned Kremlin critic who was poisoned in London in 2006.
Mr. Navalny largely appeals to younger Russians, particularly in larger cities like Moscow, but he has built up a network of offices across the country. Mr. Putin never mentions Mr. Navalny’s name in public, and state-controlled news outlets generally ignore him and his work.
But while feigning indifference, the Kremlin has repeatedly tried to silence Mr. Navalny, jailing him, accusing him of money laundering, and searching the homes and offices of his supporters.
The Russian Justice Ministry last October classified the Anti-Corruption Foundation as a “foreign agent,” a label frequently used by the Kremlin to stigmatize its critics as traitors.
Mr. Navalny, like many other Kremlin critics, has reveled in the recent unrest in neighboring Belarus and also in the Russian Far East, seeing a sudden burst of protests in those places as a sign that Moscow, too, will emerge from its long, enforced political slumber under Mr. Putin, now in power for more than two decades.
Mr. Putin recently engineered constitutional changes that remove term limits requiring him to step down in 2024 and allow him to rule potentially until 2036. Mr. Navalny denounced the changes, endorsed in a tightly controlled nationwide vote, as a constitutional coup.
Mr. Navalny announced plans to run against Mr. Putin in the 2018 presidential election, but the authorities blocked his candidacy by entangling him in a criminal case involving corruption charges widely seen as trumped up for political reasons.
Mr. Putin would almost certainly have won any election against Mr. Navalny but wanted to avoid a straight contest that would have forced him to acknowledge the existence of a rival with different ideas.
Each assault on Mr. Navalny’s person and reputation, however, has only reaffirmed his position as the country’s best-known opposition leader and stirred sympathy for him even among those who do not trust or like him.
Yonette Joseph contributed reporting from Hong Kong.