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Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been discharged from hospital, one month after being flown to Berlin for treatment. In a statement released on Wednesday, the German capital’s Charité hospital said that Navalny’s “condition had improved sufficiently for him to be discharged from acute inpatient care” on Tuesday. The Kremlin critic was transferred to Berlin on August 22 after falling ill on a domestic flight in Russia.
Alexei Navalny was poisoned via a water bottle in his Siberian hotel room, according to the Kremlin critic’s entourage. The claim was made via an Instagram post on the politician’s account on Thursday morning. In a video posted to Mr Navalny’s Instagram, his team appears to be searching the hotel room that he had been staying in.
Poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has shared his first picture from hospital as his spokeswoman confirmed that he plans to return to the country. Mr Navalny was poisoned by deadly nerve agent novichok, according to international tests. Posting on Instagram, he said he had managed to breathe by himself for an entire day and told his followers: “I miss you all.”
Russia’s “Sputnik-V” COVID-19 vaccine produced an antibody response in all participants in early-stage trials, according to results published on Friday by The Lancet medical journal that were hailed by Moscow as an answer to its critics. The results of the two trials, conducted in June-July this year and involving 76 participants, showed 100% of participants developing antibodies to the new coronavirus and no serious side effects, The Lancet said.
The Kremlin said on Tuesday it saw no need for now to investigate the circumstances leading up to opposition politician Alexei Navalny’s grave illness and that a German clinic’s initial diagnosis of poisoning was not yet conclusive. German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday called on Russia to investigate the suspected poisoning and to hold the perpetrators accountable after German doctors found indications of a toxic substance in his body.
German doctors have been allowed access to the hospitalized Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, raising the hope that authorities might allow him to be transferred to Germany for treatment soon, his chief of staff said. Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s right-hand man, said what he described as the sudden and unexpected decision of doctors in Omsk not to release Navalny to the waiting air ambulance, was a cover-up to prevent the world finding out what happened to him.
Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny was in a coma in a Siberian hospital on Thursday after drinking a cup of tea that his spokeswoman said she believed was laced with poison. A fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, Navalny started feeling ill when returning to Moscow from Tomsk in Siberia by plane on Wednesday morning. He was carried off the plane on a stretcher after it made an emergency landing at Omsk.
Russia has been working on its coronavirus vaccine effectively for the past six years, according to the head of the country’s sovereign wealth fund, with a potential rollout expected before the end of the year. There are doubts over its efficacy and safety, however, given that it is still to go through larger-scale Phase 3 clinical trials, and that no data has been published from earlier clinical trials carried out in less than two months.
President Vladimir Putin said Russia has registered its first Covid-19 vaccine, calling it an effective protection against the deadly pathogen, and disclosed that one of his own daughters had already received it. “As far as I know, this morning the first vaccine against the novel coronavirus infection in the world was registered,” Putin said Tuesday at a televised government meeting.
A Russian court ruled Thursday against a 29-year-old former U.S. Marine who was detained last year on charges of assaulting a police officer after a night of heavy drinking in Moscow, sentencing him to nine years in a Russian prison. Trevor Reed’s nine-year sentence is close to the maximum punishment for these charges, which is 10 years.