The wife of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny appealed to prison staff to provide him with basic medicines on Wednesday as his supporters warned with increasing urgency that his life was in danger.
"Navalny looks exhausted. He is really ill, and the prison colony is refusing him the most basic and necessary medicines. They are just slowly killing him in prison," his ally Lyubov Sobol said on Twitter.Navalny, the most prominent domestic critic of President Vladimir Putin, survived an attempt to poison him in 2020 with what scientists in several European countries said was a deadly nerve agent. Russia disputed that finding and the Kremlin denied trying to kill him.
An open letter to Putin, demanding that Navalny be given access to civilian doctors, was signed by 481 medics on Facebook, with others adding their names below.