Alexei Navalny: Two hours that saved the life of the leader of the Russian opposition

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is in a coma in a Berlin hospital, and Germany revealed that he was poisoned by a Novichok nerve agent.

He fell ill aboard a return flight from Siberia to Moscow and the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk. Two days later, Russian officials were persuaded to allow her to be flown to Germany.

BBC Russian has reconstructed the story of how flight attendants and medics fought to save his life in the skies of Siberia. This is the dramatic two-hour timeline of that perilous journey.

It was August 20 and Alexei Navalny was taking an S7 airline flight from Tomsk to Moscow. He did not eat or drink anything all morning, apart from a cup of tea that he bought at Tomsk Bogashevo airport, according to his press secretary, Kira Yarmysh.

Another passenger on the flight, Ilya Ageev, saw Mr. Navalny drinking tea an hour before the plane took off. The Kremlin critic was smiling and joking with fellow travelers who recognized him.

During the first half hour of the flight, Mr. Navalny began to feel ill. The flight attendants were handing out water to the passengers, but he refused it. Then he got up to go to the bathroom.

Another passenger tried to use the bathroom at the same time, but Alexei Navalny was inside for about 20 minutes. A line began to form outside the door.

By now, the four flight attendants on board knew that one of their passengers was not well.

Minutes later, a flight attendant made an announcement asking if there were doctors on board. The other passengers now realized that the situation was dire.

The rest of the cabin crew briefed the pilot and attempted to administer first aid to Mr. Navalny.

His assistant, Ilya Pakhomov, walked down the hall asking for medical assistance. A woman, who has not been identified, came forward to say she was a nurse.

For the next hour, she and the flight attendants focused on keeping Navalny conscious until the pilot could make an emergency landing, according to S7 Airlines.

Sergey Nezhenets, a lawyer, was sitting in the last row near where Mr. Navalny was being treated. He was due to move to Moscow before flying to Krasnodar in southern Russia.

“I started paying attention to what was happening when a flight attendant asked the medical professionals on board to introduce themselves,” Nezhenets told the BBC.

“A few minutes later, the pilot announced that we would be landing in Omsk, because a passenger was unwell. I only realized that the passenger in question was Navalny after landing, when I checked Twitter and saw his spokesperson’s posts.

“A few minutes after the call from a doctor, Alexei began to moan and scream. He was clearly in pain. He was lying on the ground in the part of the plane reserved for the cabin crew. He was not saying a word – he was just screaming.”

That’s when a nurse came forward to offer medical assistance, he explains.

“I don’t know what they were doing, I didn’t see,” he says. “But I heard them keep saying ‘Alexei, drink, drink, Alexei, breathe!’

“When he was moaning, the rest of us felt better, in a way because we could say that at least he was still alive. Again, I didn’t know at the time it was Navalny.”

Two of Mr. Navalny’s assistants were nearby; one was his press secretary, Kira Yarmysh.

“I was very nervous,” says Nezhenets. “The doctor asked him what happened to him and Kira said, ‘I don’t know, he was probably poisoned.’

The crew moved quickly to ask for permission for an emergency landing at Omsk, the airline says, and it happened immediately.

The plane took just over 30 minutes to land after passengers were told there would be an emergency landing.

But the cabin crew “kept checking the windows and complaining that because it was so cloudy, it was taking longer to land while Alexei was so bad.”

The lawyer heard gagging noises as he was urged to drink.

Omsk Airport Chief Medical Officer Vasily Sidorus has refused to confirm or deny this. All he said was “There was everything.”

If they had suspected food poisoning, the crew could have tried, says Israeli intensive care expert Mikhail Fremderman. “But that wouldn’t have helped in a case of organophosphate poisoning, which is what the Germans are talking about now.”

And if Mr. Navalny’s food or drink had been poisoned, dumping him would have represented a risk for those who offered him medical assistance, as well as those who cleaned the plane later.

At 09:01 Omsk time, the plane landed.

Airport medical personnel boarded the plane just two minutes after landing.

As soon as they examined Mr. Navalny, the doctors said “this is not a case for us, he needs intensive care,” recalls Mr. Nezhenets.

He then heard one of the medical staff call an ICU ambulance. They asked him to go directly to the landing zone, saying the patient was in serious condition.

He then overheard a doctor explain over the phone what color the plane was and tell the driver to park near the steps.

“We waited another 10 minutes for the ambulance to arrive,” he says. “During this time, the doctors took Navalny’s blood pressure and gave him an intravenous drip, but I think it was clear to them that it was of no use.”

Dr. Sidorus says that he did not treat Alexei Navalny personally, but that his colleagues did everything they could to save his life.

“It was difficult to understand what was going on since I couldn’t speak,” he says. “They did everything they had to do, saved a man’s life, and made sure he was transferred to a proper hospital.”

The passengers we spoke to believe that the doctors spent between 15 and 20 minutes examining Mr. Navalny on board the plane.

He was then taken off the plane and loaded onto an ambulance on his stretcher, which went directly to Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1.

The plane was refueled and, after another half hour, it continued its journey to Moscow, Nezhenets told the BBC.

“When we landed at Moscow Domodedovo airport, several policemen and men in plain clothes entered the plane.

“They asked the passengers sitting in the rows closest to where Alexei had been sitting to stay, while the rest were free to go. Alexei had been sitting somewhere in the center of the plane, row 10 or 11.”

It seemed strange that the police were coming on board. “At the time, the case did not seem criminal. And yet here was the security service.”

For two days, the Omsk hospital kept Mr. Navalny in its acute poisoning department. Initially, they did not allow him to be flown to Germany, citing his unstable condition.

However, on August 22, he was airlifted to the Charité clinic in Berlin and two days later, German doctors said their tests showed that he had been poisoned.

Doctors in Omsk, including the chief physician of Emergency Hospital No. 1 and the chief toxicologist, insisted that no poisonous substances had been detected in Mr. Navalny’s body when he was under their care. They said that a metabolic disorder was a potential alternative diagnosis.

BBC Russian has asked the Omsk health authorities for a comment and a detailed account of the stay at Navalny hospital, but has received no response.

Reporting by Anna Pushkarskaya, Elena Berdnikova, Timur Sazonov, Andrei Soshnikov and Ksenia Churmanova.