Alexey Navalny needed ambulance due to unexplained symptoms. His lawyer suspects slow poisoning.

Alexey Navalny’s attorney Vadim Kobzev reports that paramedics had been summoned to Navalny’s cell late on the night of April 7–8, due to acute symptoms that the prison personnel refuses to explain.

Kobzev says he wouldn’t rule out that Navalny is being poisoned again, this time in small dozes calculated to make him decline “gradually but steadily”:

In response to the question “What’s making me sick?” the prison doctor tells him, “It’s spring, everyone has acute symptoms.” Judging by the bizarre and outrageous situation around Navalny’s health, with sudden attacks he never used to have, we cannot rule out that they’re poisoning him slowly, to make him deteriorate gradually but steadily. This might have sounded like a paranoid idea if this was a different person, but not with regard to Navalny after Novichok. We’re going to press for toxicity testing and a radiological study.

Navalny recently spent 15 days in a penal cell (“ShIZO”). Kobzev says he lost 8 kilograms (17 pounds) in that time alone. Having been released from the punishment cell last Friday, Navalny was returned there after the episode requiring an ambulance, for another 15-day disciplinary term.

The maximal legal duration of confinement in a penal cell is 15 days. The penal colony is getting around that regulation by sending Navalny on serial back-to-back stays in the ShIZO, separated by brief periods in ordinary prison conditions.

Kobzev also says that a prison staffer has secretly alerted Navalny to an upcoming “provocation” involving a cellmate.

The attorney has informed Russia’s Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova, the head of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service Arkady Gostev, and Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov about Navalny’s plight and the violations of his rights in prison.