Doctors Denied Access To Navalny Prison Hospital
By AFP
A team of medics including ailing Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s personal doctor were denied access Tuesday to a penal colony where he is being treated at a prison hospital.
Navalny, 44, launched a hunger strike on March 31 and his medical team over the weekend warned that his health was failing so rapidly he could die at “any minute”.
Russia’s prison service, which has repeatedly prevented Navalny’s doctors from visiting him, on Monday moved him from his penal colony in the Vladimir region some 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of Moscow to a medical facility at another colony in the same region.
A team of physicians including his personal doctor Anastasia Vasilyeva has made multiple attempts to see him but been rejected each time.
On Tuesday morning the team was once again barred from seeing him, but was told to try again later in the day.
“This is super disrespectful to people who came to fulfil their human duty, a medical duty to help a patient,” Vasilyeva told AFP outside the colony.
“We are talking now only about health and life.”
Navalny’s lawyers also arrived at the penal colony on Tuesday and were allowed in, an AFP journalist at the scene reported.
Navalny is serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence for violating parole terms on old fraud charges he says are politically motivated.
The opposition politician was arrested on his return to Russia in January from Germany, where he had spent months recovering from a poisoning attack with the Novichok nerve agent.
Navalny blames the attack on President Vladimir Putin, a claim the Kremlin has repeatedly denied.
