Alexei Navalny’s condition has improved slightly, but it’s unstable and does not allow him to be transported, the chief physician of the Omsk emergency hospital No. 1 Alexander Murakhovsky told reporters on Thursday.
"The night went well. His condition somewhat improved as of eight o'clock in the morning. His condition, in any case, is still unstable. As for his transportation, I believe - and not just me, but the board is deciding - it is still premature. It is necessary to achieve a complete stabilisation of the patient's condition. Only then can we say that he can be moved wherever his relatives want", he added.
Murakhovsky also revealed that there are five diagnoses being considered today, however, doctors are not allowed to name them.
"We are all fighting for the life of our patient”, he said.
Kira Yarmysh, the press secretary for Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), has said that a board of doctors decided the opposition figure could not be transported from the Omsk hospital.
"A chief physician said that Navalny could not be transported. [His] condition is unstable", Yarmysh wrote on Twitter.
Meanwhile, director of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) Ivan Zhdanov has claimed that a representative of the transport police told him that a "dangerous substance", allegedly found in Navalny’s system, poses a threat not only to him, but also to those around him.
He, however, was unable to say what substance they were talking about. While the transport police haven’t commented on his claims yet, Murakhovsky said that so far all the tests carried out have come back negative.
"You know, I am guided in my work by official documents. And those official documents that I received from our chemical-toxicological laboratory, the spectrum of substances that have already been tested, are all negative”, Murakhovsky told reporters.
Earlier in the day, a spokeswoman for the regional Health Ministry Tatyana Shakirova told reporters that a meeting of doctors, involving physicians from Moscow, was taking place in Omsk to discuss whether Navalny could be relocated from the local hospital.
The newspaper Bild on Friday reported that a special medical aircraft had taken off from Germany to bring Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, who is currently in a coma in an intensive care unit in Russia's Omsk, to Berlin for further treatment.
According to the media, the jet departed from the Nuremberg Airport in the early hours of Friday. Navalny was reportedly supposed to be transferred to the Charite hospital in Berlin.
Navalny was on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow on Thursday when he fell ill. The airplane made an emergency landing in Omsk, where Navalny was hospitalised and put on a ventilator.
The deputy chief doctor at the hospital, Anatoly Kalinichenko, said on Thursday that Navalny was in stable condition but still in intensive care. The opposition figure's spokeswoman expressed a belief that he was poisoned, saying that Navalny only drank tea at the airport in Tomsk.
However, Kalinichenko noted that this was just one of the possible reasons behind the deterioration of Navalny's health, adding that all the necessary specialists are available and no external assistance is required.
