Russian Opposition Leader Alexey Navalny in Coma in ICU After Alleged Poisoning

Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny has been hospitalized with suspected poisoning and is in intensive care, his spokeswoman said Thursday.

Navalny, 44, fell ill on a plane returning to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk, Kira Yarmysh, the spokeswoman, said on Twitter. The aircraft made an emergency landing in Omsk where he was taken to the hospital for treatment of “toxic poisoning” and has been put on a ventilator, she said.

The anti-Kremlin activist is unconscious and in “serious condition,” Yarmysh said. Aides believe something was put in his tea during the visit to meet activists as “it was the only thing he drank from the morning,” she said.

Poison is among the potential causes being investigated, Anatoly Kalinichenko, a doctor at the Omsk clinic where Navalny is hospitalized, told journalists.

“The patient is here in the hospital in serious condition on a ventilator, but his condition is stable,” Kalinichenko said in a video posted by Yarmysh. “There is no certainty that his condition was caused by poisoning.”

The deliberate poisoning of Navalny is not currently under investigation by the authorities, state-owned Tass news service reported, citing an unidentified person in law enforcement.

Navalny became Russia’s most prominent opposition leader during massive 2011-2012 protests against President Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin for a third term following four years as prime minister.

He is the latest Kremlin critic to fall victim to an apparent poisoning. Dissident security service officer Alexander Litvinenko died in London after consuming tea laced with polonium in 2006, while ex-spy Sergei Skripal survived an assassination attempt with a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok, in England’s Salisbury in 2018, attacks that U.K. officials linked to the Russian state.

Activist Pyotr Verzilov, who led a pitch invasion during the 2018 World Cup final game in Russia to protest Putin’s rule, was treated for what doctors said were symptoms of poisoning later that year. The chief coordinator for Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia organization, Vladimir Kara-Murza, also suffered acute kidney failure after being poisoned in 2015, later making a recovery after being flown to the U.S.

Navalny has a huge following on social media in Russia, with 2.2 million followers on Twitter alone, using it to bypass a state media ban to highlight corruption among the country’s elite. His YouTube channel regularly posts investigations that have embarrassed top allies of Putin such as former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev with videos exposing their lavish lifestyles.

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