Doctor treating Navalny says German specialists will check his condition – Kremlin says Putin ‘not planning’ to talk to Merkel

The chief medical officer of the Siberian clinic where activist Alexey Navalny is hospitalized says German medical experts had arrived and will examine his condition. The Germans want to evacuate Navalny to Berlin for treatment.

“We also invited German specialists, who arrived to Omsk on an intensive-care plane, so that they could check the patient’s condition and the results of our own tests,” Dr Alexander Murakhovsky told reporters.

The news comes as the Kremlin confirmed that President Vladimir Putin is not scheduled to discuss Navalny's condition with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “No, he is not planning this,” his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, in response to a question from a journalist on whether the two leaders would directly address the subject.

Navalny, a well-known anti-corruption activist in Russia and a leading figure in the Moscow protest movement, is currently on a ventilator at the hospital. He remains in a coma although his condition is said to have “improved” overnight.

On Thursday, a plane with Navalny on board, en route from Tomsk to Moscow, made an emergency landing in Omsk, because the activist had suddenly felt unwell.

On Friday, the medical team in Omsk said they were leaning towards a diagnosis of a “metabolic disorder.” Navalny’s associates believe he was poisoned while drinking tea at Tomsk airport. However, doctors say no traces of poisons were found in his blood or urine.

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