The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been taken out of an induced coma and is responding to speech, the German hospital treating him has said, as the UK summoned the Russian ambassador to express its concern.
The Charité hospital in Berlin, which has been treating Navalny since 22 August, said his condition was improving and that he was also being weaned off mechanical ventilation.
Navalny fell ill on a flight last month and was treated in a Siberian hospital before being evacuated to Berlin. Germany last week said he had been poisoned with the nerve agent novichok.
In a statement on Monday, the Charité hospital said: “The patient has been removed from his medically induced coma and is being weaned off mechanical ventilation. He is responding to verbal stimuli. It remains too early to gauge the potential long-term effects of his severe poisoning.
“The treating physicians remain in close contact with Mr Navalny’s wife. After consultation with the patient’s wife, Charité is reassured that the decision to make details of the patient’s condition public would be in accordance with his wishes.”
The UK foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said the Russian ambassador was being summoned over the incident. “It’s completely unacceptable that a banned chemical weapon has been used and Russia must hold a full, transparent investigation,” he said in a statement.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said last week there was “unequivocal evidence” that Navalny, a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, had been poisoned using the Soviet-era nerve agent.
Novichok refers to a group of nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s to elude international restrictions on chemical weapons. Like other nerve agents, they are organophosphate compounds, but the chemicals used to make them, and their final structures, are considered classified in the UK, the US and other countries.
The most potent of the novichok substances are considered to be more lethal than VX, the most deadly of the familiar nerve agents, which include sarin, tabun and soman.
Novichok agents work in a similar way, by massively over-stimulating muscles and glands. Treatment for novichok exposure would be the same as for other nerve agents, namely with atropine, diazepam and potentially drugs called oximes.
The chemical structures of novichok agents were made public in 2008 by Vil Mirzayanov, a former Russian scientist living in the US, but the structures have never been publicly confirmed. It is thought they can be made in different forms, including as a dust aerosol.
The novichoks are known as binary agents because they only become lethal after mixing two otherwise harmless components. According to Mirzayanov, they are 10 to 100 times more toxic than conventional nerve agents.
Western leaders and many Russians have expressed horror at what Navalny’s allies say is the first known use of chemical weapons against a high-profile opposition leader on Russian soil.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied responsibility, with a spokesperson on Monday denouncing “absurd” attempts to link the poisoning to Putin.
“Attempts to somehow associate Russia with what happened are unacceptable to us, they are absurd,” Dmitry Peskov told journalists.
Russian officials accuse Germany of being slow to share the findings of its investigation despite a request from prosecutors.
“We expect information [from Germany] to be provided in the coming days,” Peskov said. “We are looking forward to it.”
The German government has increased pressure on Moscow to account for the poisoning of Navalny by casting doubt over the future of a major Russian gas pipeline.
Born in 1976 just outside Moscow, Alexei Navalny is a lawyer-turned-campaigner whose Anti-Corruption Foundation investigates the wealth of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
He started out as a Russian nationalist, but emerged as the main leader of Russia's democratic opposition during the wave of protests that led up to the 2012 presidential election, and has since been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side.
Navalny is barred from appearing on state television, but has used social media to his advantage. A 2017 documentary accusing the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, of corruption received more than 30m views on YouTube within two months.
He has been repeatedly arrested and jailed. The European court of human rights ruled that Russia violated Navalny's rights by holding him under house arrest in 2014. Election officials barred him from running for president in 2018 due to an embezzlement conviction that he claims was politically motivated. Navalny told the commission its decision would be a vote 'not against me, but against 16,000 people who have nominated me; against 200,000 volunteers who have been canvassing for me'.
There has also been a physical price to pay. In April 2017, he was attacked with green dye that nearly blinded him in one eye, and in July 2019 he was taken from jail to hospital with symptoms that one of his doctors said could indicate poisoning. In 2020, he was again hospitalised after a suspected poisoning, and taken to Germany for treatment. The German government later said toxicology results showed Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.
The chief spokesman for Merkel reinforced a warning delivered over the weekend by the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, that Berlin would not rule out sanctions for the $11bn (£8.3bn) Russian-led gas pipeline.
Maas told a local newspaper that he was against ruling out the Nord Stream 2 pipeline when considering means to pressure Russia into answering questions over the Navalny case. “I hope the Russians don’t force us to change our opinion about Nord Stream 2,” Maas said.
Merkel’s spokesman confirmed the chancellor shared the view of the foreign minister, and would not rule out sanctions against the project, just hours before Navalny emerged from the medically induced coma.
German sanctions on Nord Stream 2, which is set to double Russian gas exports to Germany from next year, would deal a potential blow to the project that is almost 90% complete and considered a key pillar of Russia’s energy strategy.
The fresh warning from the chancellor’s office is the clearest indication yet that Germany may impose sanctions on the controversial project. Merkel faces mounting pressure from within the German government to end her support for the project, which is fiercely opposed by many EU states as well as the US government.
