RUSSIAN opposition leader Alexei Navalny has said that he is recovering his verbal and physical abilities at the German hospital where he is being treated for suspected Novichok poisoning.
Navalny said he first felt despair over his condition after falling ill on a domestic flight to Moscow on August 20 before being transferred to Germany for treatment two days later.
A German military lab later determined that the Russian politician -– President Vladimir Putin’s most visible opponent - was poisoned with the nerve agent, the same class of Soviet-era material used on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018.
Navalny was kept in an induced coma for more than a week while being treated with an antidote.
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But now the opposition leader is able to walk.
He said in a post on Instagram that once he was brought out of the coma, he was confused and could not find the words to respond to a doctor’s questions.
“Although I understood in general what the doctor wanted, I did not understand where to get the words. In what part of the head do they appear in?” Navalny wrote in the post, which accompanied a photo of him on a staircase.
“I also did not know how to express my despair and, therefore, simply kept silent.
“Now I’m a guy whose legs are shaking when he walks up the stairs, but he thinks: ‘Oh, this is a staircase! They go up it. Perhaps we should look for an elevator’. And before, I would have just stood there and stared.”
The doctors treating him at Berlin’s Charite hospital “turned me from a ‘technically alive person’ into someone who has every chance to become the Highest Form of Being in Modern Society again,” he wrote.
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