[imagesource: AP]

Vladimir Putin is not the sort of enemy you want to make.

Cross Donald Trump, for example, and you’re likely to be called a “loser” on Twitter.

Cross the Russian president, and you’re going to “kick the bucket” – his words, not mine.

It doesn’t even matter if you’re a doctor trying to fight against COVID-19, although in that scenario, you’re likely to end up ‘falling out a window’.

In the case of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (above), a long-time foe of Putin, he must have known that his time would eventually come, and it did.

During a flight from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow on August 20, he collapsed, and the plane was forced to make an emergency landing so that he could be rushed to intensive care.

In the footage below, you can hear Navalny on the plane, and see footage of him being placed into an ambulance:

He was first treated in Russia, but then moved to Berlin after negotiations with the relevant authorities.

Navalny had been campaigning to get fellow anti-corruption campaigners elected to local councils in Russia.

He spent 32 days in Berlin’s Charité Hospital, and is now staying in an unnamed and heavily guarded Berlin hotel, having been poisoned with a Novichok-type nerve agent.

That’s a favourite of Vlad’s, and was developed by Soviet scientists during the Cold War, with just a tiny amount often enough to result in death.

Russian authorities deny any involvement, and also deny that poison was present in his system, but multiple tests performed outside of Russia stated “beyond doubt” that Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent.

You can see how his aides managed to get the evidence of his poisoning out of Russia here.

The 44-year-old recently spoke with the BBC about his experience of being poisoned:

He felt cold shivers initially and no pain, “but it felt like the end”.

“It doesn’t hurt at all, it’s not like a panic attack or some sort of upset. At the beginning you know something is wrong, and then really your only thought is: that’s it, I’m going to die.”

He told the BBC that on the plane, as the poison took effect, he felt unable to focus on anything, though people and objects around him were not swaying or blurred in the way that alcohol affects the brain.

Much later in hospital “there were several phases of reawakening, and that was the most hellish period”.

Navalny said he suffered prolonged hallucinations where his wife and doctors were telling him he’d been in an accident where he had lost his legs, and a surgeon was going to give him “new legs and a new spine”

Sounds like one helluva bad trip.

He went on to say that he is now unable to sleep without taking sleeping pills, and suffers from unpredictable tremors in his hands:

“Sometimes I feel sort of spaced out, I go for walks twice daily, and can walk for quite some time. For me the hardest part is getting in and out of the car.”

He expressed relief that he was not in any pain, but frustration that even a simple thing like throwing a little ball “feels like shot-putting” in athletics.

It is hoped that his recovery will continue, and many of the symptoms will lessen over time.

I would say that returning to Russia any time soon should certainly be off the table.

[source:bbc]