The mysterious death of the doctors who saved Alexei Navalny, Putin’s nemesis

Russian dissident Alexei Navalny is the hardest stone Vladimir Putin has in his place. The Kremlin security services have done everything in recent months to get rid of him without success. They poisoned him with the nerve agent Novichok When he got on a plane the ship had to make an emergency landing to save his life, two days later local doctors managed to transfer him to Berlin for proper treatment, he survived after two months in intensive care, he returned to Moscow, they arrested him, he went to maximum security prison and now he is on a hunger strike because they are not giving him the medicine he needs for his recovery . Navalny appears to be made of tungsten, the strongest metal on the planet.

Given Navalny’s resilience, it seems the efforts to punish him were directed to those who helped him survive. Some of these events are suspected in Europe that occurred with the sudden death of two of the doctors who treated the dissident at the No. 1 Emergency Hospital in Omsk, the Siberian city where the plane made the emergency landing after the poisoning. The last case happened this week. Rustam AgishevThe 63-year-old doctor in the acute poisoning unit died of a stroke. In February, the head of the intensive care unit of the same hospital, Sergei Maksimishin, 55, died of a “sudden heart attack”.

A colleague of the two doctors, Dr Maria Morozova, told Russian press that their deaths were “Very unexpected.” In London, various press articles indicated that the doctors “have probably been liquidated” to prevent him from sharing the details of the Navalny assassination attempt. And they quote a post on the net Telegram under the name of “General SVR”, who on other occasions has given confidential information about the health of Putin and other leaders of his government, who said: “The question is not whether he was involved in Alexei’s treatment. Navalny, but rather that the reason for his liquidation was your willingness to share information on the treatment to which he had access ”.

In October, another deputy head of the hospital, Anatoly KalinichenkoHe quit his job, saying he had moved to a private clinic because of “his love of surgery”. When Navalny was rushed, Kalinichenko was initially responsible for his medical care. He also spoke to the media and doctors in Germany, where Navalny was later transferred. But he was immediately moved and took his place the head of the hospital, Aleksandr Murakhovsky, member of the ruling United Russia party, who assured that Navalny’s serious state of health was not caused by poisoning but by a “metabolic disorder”. Murakhovsky, who also delayed Navalny’s transfer to Berlin for two days, was later appointed Minister of Health for the Omsk region.

On August 20 last year, Navalny, 44, boarded an S7 airline flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow. At the airport, he drank a tea where the poison was reportedly deposited on him. Half an hour later, already in the air, he started to feel bad and in ten minutes the pains made him squirm and scream. One of them recorded the scene and uploaded it to social media. When they looked for a doctor on board, they only found a nurse who gave him first aid. The pilot decided to make an emergency landing in the city of Omsk. There, an ambulance was waiting for him and took him to the emergency hospital. Navalny slipped into an induced coma and was evacuated to Germany, where he spent five months recovering from the poisoning. Tests in Europe have determined that the toxin belonged to the Novichok family of Soviet-era nerve agents.

In January, Navalny returned to Russia. He was detained at the airport. A Moscow court ruled that in Germany, Navalny had violated the probation sentence of several years ago for an alleged embezzlement. The sentence was two and a half years in prison. Since then he has been in Correctional Colony No.2, about 100 kilometers from Moscow, one of the hardest prisons in Russia.

The court ruling threw a series of protests in major Russian cities. Thousands of people took to the streets and lit candles. The repression was brutal. One of the toughest of those experienced in Putin’s Russia. Hundreds of people have been found guilty of resisting authority. In early March, the EU and the United States imposed sanctions on Russia for the poisoning and imprisonment of Navalny. “The intelligence community views with great confidence that Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents used nerve agent to poison Russian opposition leader Alexi Navalny, ”White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. Although President Joe Biden has yet to determine what sanctions he will take against the Russian government.

The situation worsened when Navalny’s allies reported on March 24 that his health was deteriorating and he was not receiving medical treatment. Prison authorities said in a statement that Navalny complained of pain in one leg and asked for help to receive injections to treat it. The dissident responded the next day with a letter on social media that they did not provide you with the correct medication and refuse to allow your doctor to visit you. Since entering prison, he has lost eight kilograms. He also complained in a second post that nightly checks carried out by a prison guard every hour amounted to sleep deprivation torture. Navalny’s lawyer Olga Mikhailova said after visiting her in prison that “her right leg is in terrible condition”. And his wife, Yulia, ensured that it was all part of Putin’s “personal revenge”. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied everything and said the president did not follow “daily prison events”.

Putin faces other serious issues at the same time. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, private and foreign investors have lost interest in the country. With economic growth just above zero, real incomes fell by 10.6% compared to 2014. The government admitted a decline in GDP of 3.1% in 2020, but in terms of rubles, and the ruble is weakening day by day. Measured in dollars, Russia’s GDP in 2020 was 10% lower than in 2019. The only good news Putin has received in recent times is that Russian laboratories have grown. the Sputnik V vaccine against Covid. This has restored a certain prestige to Russian science and has somehow washed away the image of the president.

“Economists say the ruble is undervalued due to ‘political factors’. But these factors are the work of the Kremlin itself. It is Putin’s absolute rejection, not only of democratization and economic liberalization, but of any attempt at modernization, that brought the economy to its knees“Explained Andrei Kolesnicov of the Moscow Carnegie Center.

And it’s not just the economy that’s suffering. The justice system is not credible. Universities are losing their intellectual vigor, professors being repressed and student activists expelled. Even the state bureaucracy is deteriorating. “Putin’s regime has become obsolete, morally, politically and technologically”Kolesnikov wrote. And he gave as an example of the reverse that the portraits of Genrikh Yagoda, the director of the dreaded NKVD (the secret police of the Soviet Union), were again hung in the police station (one of them was visible during one of Navalny’s trials). And it goes up a statue of Lavrenti Beria, the most terrifying figure in post-Stalin 20th-century Russian history, in the Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation showroom.

It is in this context that Navalny remains on hunger strike in prison and during which the two doctors who facilitated his transfer to Germany died, the action that defined to save the life of the famous dissident.

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