Navalny's allies fear for his life as he complains about deteriorating health

Alexei Navalny says he is losing the use of one of his legs while jailed in a notorious Russian penal colony, with his team claiming that the opposition leader has been deliberately denied medical treatment.

Mr Navalny, an outspoken critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, has taken a turn for the worse after he first started experiencing severe back pain four weeks ago, he said in official complaints released on Thursday.

“My condition has deteriorated, severe pain has spread to my right leg which has lost sensation from the calf downwards. I’m having difficulty walking,” he wrote.

Mr Navalny blamed the prison authorities for wilfully denying him medical help “to damage my health.”

His allies first raised the alarm about his condition on Wednesday after the prison administration refused to let his lawyers see him.

Vadim Kobzev, his lawyer, who was able to see him on Thursday, said that Mr Navalny was taken for an MRI scan on Wednesday but has been kept in the dark about the results or any possible diagnosis.

“He’s losing sensation in his leg, and the way things are going, he’s going to need crutches soon,” he said, adding that his client is given only two ibuprofen pills a day, which he considers a “mockery.”

Mr Navalny has filed a separate complaint against intrusive surveillance while he sleeps, saying he is woken up eight times a night. “They’re practically torturing me by depriving me of sleep,” Mr Navalny said in the complaint, citing Russian prison regulations, guaranteeing uninterrupted sleep for inmates.

Mr Navalny's wife on Thursday called on President Putin to release him.

“Everyone who knows Alexei knows that he is not a complainer… Alexei didn’t want us to speak about it so that it wouldn’t look like he was complaining,” Yulia Navalnaya said in an Instagram post, adding that the prison administration did not allow his family to pass him any medication.

“I demand that my husband, Alexei Navalny, who was locked up illegally, be immediately released. He was locked up because (Putin) is afraid of political competition and wants to sit on his throne for the rest of his life.”

Mr Navalny fell unconscious on the plane from Siberia to Moscow last August after being poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent, and spent weeks in a coma in a German hospital before making a full recovery.

He has blamed the attack on the Kremlin and helped to investigate what he described as an operation by the Russian intelligence to kill him.

The Kremlin denied those accusations. Mr Navalny was detained at passport control when he returned to Russia in January for the first time since the poisoning.

He was arrested and promptly sentenced to nearly three years in prison for failing to see his probation officer while in Germany.

The Kremlin’s most formidable opponent, whose incarceration sparked three weeks of street protests, is serving his time in a notorious prison colony about 120 kilometres east of Moscow.

The facility stands out among Russian penitentiaries for its particularly strict regime that includes routines like standing at attention for hours.

In a letter smuggled from the prison, Mr Navalny earlier this month jokingly referred to it as “our friendly consternation camp” and said that he had a guard watching over and filming him all night since he is considered a flight risk.

Mr Navalny’s team in a statement posted on his blog named President Putin to be “personally responsible” for the politician’s health.

“We demand that a doctor be immediately allowed to see Alexei, start the treatment and stop torturing him by sleep deprivation.”

Russian prison authorities earlier on Thursday sought to assuage fears about Mr Navalny’s deteriorating health, saying that his condition was “stable and satisfactory.”