A day after an unauthorised election protest he planned drew mass arrests in Moscow, Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, was hospitalised with a “severe allergic reaction” in jail, his spokeswoman said Sunday.
“Over his whole life, Alexei has never experienced an allergic reaction,” the spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, wrote on Twitter. But she said that his face was severely swollen and he had red spots on his skin.
Navalny was arrested Wednesday and sentenced to 30 days in jail for calling a rally Saturday, to protest a decision by the election authorities to bar several opposition candidates from running for Moscow’s City Council.
The protest led to the arrests of more than 1,300 demonstrators. The rally was the latest in a series of street demonstrations staged as President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings have dropped amid economic hardship.
Yarmysh wrote that employees at the special detention centre in Russia where Navalny was being held had called an ambulance, and that he had been taken to a hospital where police officers were guarding his room.
Though the reason for his hospitalisation was unclear, Navalny is no stranger to having his health imperilled because of his activism.
He has been roughed up by Russian law enforcement officers and arrested many times. In May 2017, an assailant threw a green chemical into his face, resulting in an 80% loss of his sight in one eye, he said. His vision may improve, but the outlook was unclear, Navalny wrote on his website that year, citing a doctor’s diagnosis.
On Sunday evening, Navalny’s regular physician, Anastasy Vasilyeva, visited him in the hospital with another doctor, Yaroslav Ashikhmin, and said she saw similarities to that incident.
“As the doctor who treated Alexei’s severe eye burn two years ago, I can say with confidence that both today and in 2017 what happened was a result of the damage inflicted by an undetermined chemical substance,” Vasilyeva wrote on Facebook.
“Alexei doesn’t have any allergy and has never had one. Moreover, he ate the same food with his cellmates and didn’t use any new perfumes or personal care products,” she said, adding that while in the hospital, Navalny can only eat the food that is allowed in prison.
Vasilyeva also wrote that her access to Navalny was limited.
“Almost immediately we were told to leave,” she wrote. After deliberations with the hospital’s head doctor, Vasilyeva said that she and Ashikhmin were able to examine Navalny “through a door.”
Navalny was also doused with a green liquid earlier in March 2017, but that attack had no known adverse health effects.
One of his allies, Leonid Volkov, said on Twitter on Sunday that he had spent 28 days in the same cell in June and had a similar experience to the apparent allergic reaction.
“Immediately upon release, I got all swollen and covered with red spots,” Volkov wrote. “We thought this was an allergy.”
“Looks like Alexei has the same symptoms and this is some kind of a strange allergy,” he said.
Late Sunday night, Moscow police arrested more than a dozen people who came to stand in front of the hospital, according to OVD-Info, an independent monitor that tracks arrests around the city.
©2019 New York Times News Service
