Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny shares first photo from Berlin hospital
“Hi, this is Navalny. I miss you. I still can hardly do anything, but yesterday I was able to breathe on my own for the whole day. Just myself. I did not use any outside help, not even the simplest valve in my throat. I liked it very much. An amazing, underestimated process by many. Recommended.”
On August 20, 2020, Navalny fell ill during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow and was hospitalised in the Emergency City Clinical Hospital No. 1 in Omsk where the plane had made an emergency landing.
His spokeswoman said that he was in a coma and on a ventilator in the hospital. She also said that Navalny only drank tea since the morning and that it was suspected that something was mixed into his drink.
A plane was sent from Germany to evacuate Navalny from Russia for treatment at the Charité in Berlin, after the doctors treating him in Omsk had initially declared he was too sick to be transported but later released him. On 24 August, the doctors in Germany announced they had confirmed that Navalny had been poisoned with a cholinesterase inhibitor. On September 2, the German government announced that Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent, from the same family of nerve agents that was used to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter.
