DRAMA ON THE PLANE

DRAMA ON THE PLANE Alexei Navalny was transferred to the hospital in an unconscious state, they put poison in his tea? Putin's main critic felt weak on the plane and was rushed to hospital after landing By: Damjan RaknićPosted: August 20, 2020 7:54 am Donald Trump SENATE COMMITTEE 'Russia used Manafort, WikiLeaks and others to help Trump in the 2016 election.' AGAINST PASSIVITY Top expert on the region: EU and US policy has crashed, we must not allow a repeat of the 90s Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, 44, is in hospital after he was allegedly poisoned, writes The Guardian . His spokeswoman Kira Jarmiš claims that he is unconscious and that he was poisoned by someone poisoning him in tea. Jarmiš says that Navalny got sick on Thursday on the flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The plane landed urgently in Omsk, and Navalny was rushed to hospital where he is currently in the intensive care unit. The Russian news agency TASS writes that the Emergency Hospital in Omsk confirmed that they received Navalny and that his health condition is serious. Russian state media RIA Novosti writes that Navalny is stable, and cites hospital employees as a source of information. "We assume that Alexei (Navalny) was poisoned so that something was mixed into his tea. That was the only thing he drank this morning. Doctors say the poison worked faster because the drink was hot. Alexei is currently unconscious," she wrote. is Jarmiš on Twitter. Jarmiš compared this incident to last year's, when Navalny experienced an allergic reaction that one doctor characterized as a possible reaction to poisoning by an unknown chemical . Navalny, who has been waging a political struggle against incumbent Russian President Vladimir Putin for years , used protests in Belarus against President Alexander Lukashenko to persuade Russians to support the candidates he supports in the upcoming local elections. That is why Navalny was in Tomsk, and he also visited other Siberian cities where elections are to be held. About 40 million voters will take part in the election, which will take place next month. Navalny recently spoke enthusiastically on his YouTube channel about how strikes by key groups of workers in Belarus forced authorities to establish communication with protesters. Navalny called the Belarusian workers who said they voted for the opposition candidates "Russia of the future" with videos. One of his aides, Leonid Volkov , said he and other activists were recording what tactics the Belarusian authorities were using. "We are closely following Lukashenko's attempts to shut down the Internet," Volkov wrote on Twitter. "It's very important because there's no doubt that the same thing is smiling at us in Russia." Activists believe that a Belarusian scenario could happen to Russia when Putin, thanks to a change in the constitution, runs again in the 2024 presidential election. "In today's Belarus, we see ourselves in the future," said opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov . "The opposition candidate gets 80 percent of the vote and the dictator 10 percent, however the election committee only replaces the results." There are signs that the Kremlin knew that protests in Belarus could be a threat as coverage of the Belarusian opposition in the state media has changed from benevolent to inflammatory. This is not the first time that an opposition politician or Putin's opponent has been poisoned or poisoned. Former agent of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, Alexander Litvinenko , who fled to Great Britain, died in 2006 from polonium poisoning that was injected into his tea. Opposition activist and member of the Pussy group Riot Piotr Verzilov claims that in 2018 he was poisoned in Moscow and that he spent several months in hospitals in Moscow and Berlin because of the attack. Who is Alexei Navalny? Many see Alexei Navalny as a possible, desired and coveted successor to Putin. Navalny is a young, handsome and ambitious politician who, after 15 years of Putin's rule, managed to impose himself as someone who is said to be able to at least try to endanger the power of the Kremlin lord. - He is the final light at the end of the tunnel - says Stanislav Belkovsky, one of the leading Russian political scientists and the author of a notable book about Vladimir Putin, about Navalny. Navalny is a man who corresponds to a Russian political being who defined himself in the transition times of post-Soviet Russia. He is an ideal charismatic strong person who suits the broadest strata of Russian society. He is 44 years old, "he looks Aryan, blond", which means that he is "pure blood and an unquestionable Russian" (I can't count "other people's blood cells"). He was educated, a lawyer, he was educated at Yale and he is of good and suitable origin - Father Anatoly was an officer in the Soviet army, so he is acceptable from that patriotic-Great Russian side as well. He is very ambitious ("He wants to be president", says Belkovski) and sympathetic, but also cynical enough and a man who fits Russian ideas: a father of two, he is not innocent, nor is he an ascetic (he knows how to drink, swear, fight). He's like in the title of his favorite Sergio Leone movie, "Good, Bad, Evil!" In political terms, he is Western-oriented, but still a big enough Russian that he cannot be persuaded to worship foreigners. ( Vlado Vurusic