The wife of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said her concern for her husband's health was growing amid the second week of his self-imposed hunger strike.
"I have never seen the skin wrapped around the skull like this, but I know that he is not going to give up," Navalny's wife, Yulia Navalnaya, wrote in an Instagram post, as translated by Google, after she visited her husband at a penal colony outside Moscow on Tuesday. "He writes funny posts on Instagram.... But after meeting with Alexei, I worry about him even more."
Navalny was arrested January 17 and is serving a two and a half year sentence for violating the terms of his probation while he was in Germany recovering from a nerve-agent poisoning he blames on the Kremlin. Russian authorities have rejected the accusation.
The jailed politician announced his hunger strike on March 31 in protest of the medical attention, or lack thereof, he was receiving in prison, saying he did not receive adequate treatment for leg and back pain.
"What else could I do?" Navalny wrote in a letter posted by his team to Instagram. "I have declared a hunger strike demanding that they allow a visit by an invited doctor in compliance with the law. So I'm lying here, hungry, but still with two legs."
Navalnaya wrote that during the visit she spoke with her husband by phone through a glass screen.
"Went on a date today with the coolest guy ever," her post reads. She added that although her husband is still "cheerful and fun," the hunger strike was showing its physical effects.
"He speaks with difficulty and from time to time hangs up and lies down on the table to rest," she wrote.
Navalnaya added that the prison officials were breaching her husband's legal rights by continuing to prohibit a doctor from seeing Navalny, 44, who had dropped nearly 9 kilograms (20 pounds) to 76 kilograms (168 pounds) since the start of his hunger strike. She said his current weight loss in comparison to last September, when he was poisoned and in a coma, was significant.
Prison officials have pressured Navalny to step down from his strike. Letters posted to social media posts by Navalny's team claim that Kremlin officials have placed candy in his pockets, allowed chicken to be cooked in his unit's kitchen and threatened to force-feed him in an effort to interrupt his strike.
"Seeing the severity of the hunger strike, the administration threatens to force-feed them every day. At the same time, Alexei was transferred back from the medical unit to the detachment. The doctor is not allowed to see him," a recent tweet from Navalny's team said, as translated by Google.
Despite her expression of increasing concern for her husband, Navalnaya concluded her post by saying that Navalny sent his "greetings" and "is simply the best.... Everything will be okay."
In a separate post on Tuesday to his own Instagram page, Navalny announced he was suing the prison officials because they refused to provide him with a Koran, the Muslim holy book.
"When I was jailed, I made a list of ways I wanted to improve myself that I will try to complete in jail. One of the points was to deeply study and understand the Koran," he wrote. "Books are our everything, and if you have to sue for the right to read, I will sue."
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
