Alexei Navalny’s lawyer has confirmed that the opposition leader is “seriously ill” after reports emerged that he had been transferred to a prison sick ward for a respiratory illness and had been tested for coronavirus.
The Kremlin critic said in a note published on Monday that he was coughing and had a temperature of 38.1C (100.6F). Several prisoners from his ward had already been treated in hospital for tuberculosis, Navalny wrote. Hours later, the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia reported he had been moved to a sick ward and tested for coronavirus, among other diseases.
On Tuesday, Russian police arrested several Navalny supporters who had travelled to the prison 60 miles east of Moscow to petition for him to receive proper medical care. Anastasia Vasilyeva, the head of the Russian Doctors’ Alliance, along with three other members of the renegade medical union were arrested. Reporters for CNN and for Belsat, a Russian-language television channel based in Poland, were also briefly detained. » | Andrew Roth in Moscow | Tuesday, April 6, 2021
