Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posted a photo of himself in a Berlin hospital bed on Tuesday (Sept. 15). He is currently recovering in the hospital after being poisoned by a nerve agent in Siberia last month.
Navalny is sitting on his bed with his family gathered around him. He says he’s happy to be able to breathe on his own without relying on machines.
“I miss each and every one of you,” Navalny wrote in an Instagram post. “I still can barely do anything, but I was able to breathe on my own all day yesterday.”
This is the first time Navalny has released an image of himself since he was taken for treatment in Berlin, where he collapsed on a flight to Moscow on Aug. 20 and was rushed to a hospital in Siberia before being airlifted two days later to Berlin’s Charité Hospital for treatment.
Shortly after the photo was released, Navalny’s spokeswoman confirmed that the 44-year-old planned to return to Russia.
Germany, France and Sweden concluded that Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent. Britain said it was the same nerve agent that had poisoned former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, two years earlier.
The West has demanded explanations from Moscow, which has said that the allegations of Russian involvement in the poisoning are baseless. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that Moscow needs information from Germany about the case in order to clear up the incident.
Peskov said Russian authorities do not understand why French and Swedish laboratories were allowed to test Navalny’s medical samples, while Russia was not.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the West of using Navalny’s poisoning as a pretext to impose new sanctions on Moscow.
Navalny’s illness has further strained ties between Russia and the West. After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea in Ukraine and the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter, Russia’s relations with the West deteriorated to their lowest point since the Cold War.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been pressured to punish Moscow by delaying the construction of a nearly completed gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.
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