Alexei Navalny reappeared after 24 days of hunger strike against Vladimir Putin: “I am a scary skeleton”

MOSCOW: The picture is not clear but it shows him with shaved hair, a thin face and some marks on his cheek. After a 24-day hunger strike in prison, the opponent of Vladimir Putin’s government, Alexei Navalny, He appeared today for the first time in court, which accuses him of committing fraud and embezzlement in 2014, and said: “I am a scary skeleton.”

His health had already been in doubt for weeks. His lawyers even warned a few days ago that he was in poor condition and that his life was in danger. Navalny, who in August of last year started to feel bad on a flight, then He was hospitalized for five months in Germany after being the victim of poisoning, He had gone on a hunger strike in prison at the end of March, protesting that he was not feeling well and that the authorities were unwilling to let him see his personal doctor or take medication. “Why do prisoners go on hunger strike? This question worries only those who were not prisoners. Everything looks complicated from the outside. But from the inside, everything is simple: you have no other methods of combat, ”he wrote on his Instagram account at the time.

Today, his appearance in court shows the devastation of those weeks. For 24 days, Navalny refused to eat despite his collaborators outside asking him to end his protest because his health was deteriorating: his potassium levels in his blood had become critical and he was on the verge of cardiac arrest, according to a group of doctors supporting him.

However, the physical weakness did not prevent him from continuing his fight. In his speech, accused the Kremlin of having turned “the Russians into slaves” and called Vladimir Putin a “naked king”, alluding to the popular history of Hans Christian Andersen The Emperor’s New Costume.

“I mean, my dear judge, your king is naked and millions of people are shouting about it. Twenty years of unsuccessful government have led to this result: a crown that falls in his ears, lies on television, we have wasted billions of rubles and our country continues to sink into poverty, “said the opponent according to what was published by The Guardian newspaper.

After that, Navalny, 44, turned to his wife. “Julia, if you can hear me, stand up for a second, I want to look at you.” I looked at myself in a mirror yesterday and I am a scary skeleton. He weighed the same as in seventh. If I had taken off my tunic, I would have looked much worse ”.

Then he detailed his current diet. “Yesterday I ate four tablespoons of oatmeal, today five. When it hits 10 tablespoons, it will be a huge leap forward. But to get 60 grams of raw carrots, I wrote a request, they are still thinking about it ”, stated as published by Sky News.

His court appearance comes amid the shutdown of his network of offices in the country due to Russian authorities seeking to have them and his anti-corruption foundation banned and classified as extremist groups.

Leonid Volkov, who heads the offices as Navalny’s chief strategy officer, said today that keeping the network in its current state “is impossible” due to accusations of extremism and the number of opposition collaborators who have been arrested and face criminal charges.

Navalny was arrested in January on his return home from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from neurotoxin poisoning for which he blames the Kremlin. The Russian authorities reject this accusation. Meanwhile, his arrest and living conditions in prison sparked protests across the country.

AP and Reuters agencies

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