Alex Navalny ‘able to leave his bed’, hospital reveals after labs confirm Novichok poisoning

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Russian opposition leader Alex Navalny is now able to leave his bed after it was confirmed by Swedish and French labs that he was poisoned with Novichok.

Mr Navalny has been taken off ventilation, the Berlin hospital treating him has confirmed, after he fell ill on August 20.

As Mr Navalny’s condition improves, tensions between Russia and the west have continued to intensify over allegations of his poisoning by the Russian government.

Today, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the West of using the suspected poisoning as a pretext to impose additional sanctions on Russia.

The statements were made shortly after Lavrov cancelled a planned trip to Berlin for talks on Tuesday due to what the Russian Foreign Ministry said was a change in his German counterpart’s schedule.

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘condemned unsubstantiated’ accusations during a call with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.

The Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin hospital confirmed Mr Navalny’s condition ‘continues to improve’ in a statement this afternoon.

It said: ‘The patient has been successfully removed from mechanical ventilation. He is currently undergoing mobilization and is able to leave his bed for short periods of time.

‘The decision to make details of Mr. Navalny’s condition public was made in consultation with the patient and his wife.’

The news came after French and Swedish labs confirmed Novichok was found in Mr Navalny’s blood.

German military laboratory previously confirmed the substance was present in his samples.

German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has also received samples and is taking steps to have those tested at its reference laboratories.

The new results prompted Macron to tell the Russian president in telephone talks that it was ‘imperative that all light be shed, without delay, on the circumstances of this attempted murder and who is responsible’, the French presidency said in a statement.

Putin fired back that the claims remained ‘unsubstantiated accusations based on nothing against the Russian side’.

The paramedics who treated Mr Navalny found no increase in his blood sugar in initial tests and saw no signs of a metabolic disorder, according to five medical sources.

Their accounts contradict the public diagnosis given by the doctors at Emergency Hospital No. 1 in Omsk, where he was treated.

Doctors said Navalny had fallen into a coma due to a metabolic disorder and experienced blood sugar levels four times higher than normal.

Three sources with knowledge of Navalny’s initial treatment by four paramedics before he was taken off the plane and at the airfield said glucometry, a glucose test, showed his blood sugar was 3-5 mmol (millimoles) per litre – within normal limits.

‘There was no diabetes there, it was all checked at once and ruled out,’ one of the sources said. 

‘The indicator was normal, there was no problem in carbohydrate metabolism.’

Contacted for comment on the accounts of the paramedics’ findings, Alexander Sabaev, chief toxicologist of Omsk’s Emergency Hospital No. 1, disputed them.

‘No, this is not true, the ambulance team saw sugar 13 mmol per litre,’ he said. ‘Metabolic parameters can only be found by biochemical analysis, which can only be done in a hospital.’

A sugar level of 13 mmol per litre is well above normal.

Sabaev said further that Navalny had a ‘tendency to coma’ and noted the paramedics did not administer atropine, a drug used when particular kinds of poisoning are suspected.

Three sources who said the paramedics saw clinical signs of poisoning said they gave him some unspecified injections to treat his symptoms but did not give atropine on the airfield because they did not suspect that kind of poisoning.

Sabaev said last week he had initially suspected poisoning because of what the paramedics and Navalny’s allies had told him and gave Navalny a small dose of atropine to treat a problem with his lungs once he was in the hospital.

Some medical sources have said that probably saved Navalny’s life, due to his critical condition. 

Atropine is used widely in emergency situations, including to treat the effects of pesticides or nerve agents such as Novichok, the banned substance Berlin said it found in Navalny’s body.

In his same public comments last week, Sabaev said he had changed his mind about poisoning after receiving laboratory test results that he said did not show any sign of toxins.

Mr Navalny fell ill on a Russian domestic flight on August 20. He was transferred to Germany two days later, where he has remained in hospital. 

It comes as two allies of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navanly won local parliament seats Monday in the Siberian city of Tomsk where he was allegedly poisoned last month, according to early poll results.

Andrei Fateev and Ksenia Fadeeva came out on top in two constituencies, while the ruling United Russia party topped the polls overall in Tomsk with 24.46 percent of the vote, according to early results published by regional election officials.

Opposition candidate Fadeeva vowed: ‘You can’t sit on the throne for 20 years, grab, steal endlessly, do all of this and go unpunished.’  

The local elections were closely watched for signs of protest voting against the ruling party that backs President Vladimir Putin amid frustrations over years of falling wages and the government’s handling of the pandemic.

The votes also followed the suspected poisoning by a rare nerve agent of opposition politician Navalny who had promoted a tactical voting strategy to hurt United Russia and fielded dozens of candidates for city councils in Siberia.

Official early results showed pro-Kremlin politicians backed by Putin coasting to landslide wins to serve as the governors of the regions of Komi, Tatarstan, Kamchatka and more than a dozen others. Votes were still being counted.

But Navalny’s supporters scored rare victories in city council votes in Novosibirsk, Russia’s third city by population, and the student town of Tomsk where United Russia, which dominates regional power, appeared to have lost its council majority.

‘People are sick of the authorities. You can’t sit on the throne for 20 years, grab, steal endlessly, do all of this and go unpunished,’ said Ksenia Fadeyeva, who won a council seat in Tomsk.

Navalny supporter Andrei Fateev, 32, also won a seat in Tomsk, while others such as Sergei Boyko, another ally of Navalny, looked set to win council seats in Novosibirk.

‘This completely destroys the whole myth about the 2% of liberals and that their ‘support is only among hipsters inside the Garden ring road (in Moscow)’,’ said Leonid Volkov, a close ally of Navalny.

With Navalny sidelined by the suspected poisoning, his allies pressed ahead with his ‘smart voting’ strategy, naming more than a thousand politicians they thought were well placed to beat ruling party candidates and urging Russians to vote for them.

In Tomsk, Fateev said United Russia appeared to have won only 12 out of 37 seats on the council after many candidates backed by the smart voting strategy had gone on to win.

Tatiana Doroshenko, a local election official, said she could not remember United Russia ever performing so badly in her 15 years as chairwoman of a district election commission in Tomsk.

‘This is an awesome case example … you can actually engage in politics and it’s not futile as it had seemed just so recently,’ said Fateev.

Elsewhere it was not immediately clear how Navalny’s strategy had fared with votes still being counted.

Andrey Turchak, United Russia’s general secretary, said the party had scored a ‘confident victory’ in votes seen as a dry run for next year’s parliament elections and weathered the smart voting strategy.

The independent Golos watchdog said ahead of the elections that many opposition candidates had been barred from competing, including several from the Communist party that has seats in parliament and often backs Putin on key policies.

The watchdog also criticised a move to stretch voting out over three days, which it said made potential election fraud harder to catch for monitors.