Navalny is being treated at a hospital in Berlin after falling ill last week on a flight from Siberia. He was transferred to the German capital of the Siberian city of Omsk on Saturday morning.
“We are dealing with a patient who, it is quite likely, was poisoned,” Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters during a news release on Monday. “Because there is a certain chance of a poison attack, protection is necessary,” Seibert said.
Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said last week that he had fallen ill from suspected poisoning on a flight to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk.
Navalny, a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been treated at Berlin’s hospital, which, according to Seibert, will provide updates on the opposition leader’s condition. Jaka Bizilj, president of Cinema for Peace Foundation, which organized the medical evacuation, told CNN on Saturday that Navalny was in a “stable condition.”
The Siberian hospital that had previously treated Navalny denied claims he was poisoned – even because his wife said doctors there could not be trusted.
On Friday, Anatoly Kalinichenko, the deputy chief physician at the Russian hospital where Navalny was being treated, told a news conference that no toxins were found in Navalny’s blood or urine. “We do not believe that the patient suffered poisoning,” Kalinichenko told local journalists.
“Toxins as traces of their presence in the body have not been identified. Probably the diagnosis of ‘poisoning’ remains somewhere in the back of our heads. But we do not believe that the patient suffered poisoning,” he added.
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