‘Now I’m a guy whose legs are shaking while walking’: Alexei Navalny shares his account of recovery

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny took to social media to announce on Saturday that he could now walk with a “tremble” and gave the detailed account of his recovery nearly a month after being allegedly poisoned with nerve agent novichok.

The 44-year-old posted a photo of himself walking down the stairs on Instagram and described how he was regaining his mental and physical capability.

“Just recently, I did not recognise people and did not understand how to talk. Every morning the doctor came to me and said: ‘Alexei, I brought a board, let’s figure out which word we can write on it’. This drove me to despair because although I understood in general what the doctor wanted, I did not understand where to get the words from,” wrote the staunch critic of Kremlin.  

“Now I’m a guy whose legs are shaking when he walks up the stairs, but this guy thinks: ‘Oh, this is a staircase! People get up on these. Perhaps we should look for an elevator.’ But before, I would have just stood there and stared at it blankly,” the post added.

The latest update on his progress comes days after the anti-corruption campaigner posted a picture on Tuesday with his family saying he had spent a day breathing unassisted.

ALSO READ| ‘I can breathe on my own’: Alexei Navalny posts first photo after recovery

Alexei Navalny fell ill on a plane from Siberia to Moscow on August 20 and spent two days in a Russian hospital before being airlifted to Berlin’s Charite hospital.

Appreciating the effort put in by the doctors, Navalny said, “There are many problems yet to be solved but amazing doctors from the Charité hospital have solved the main one.” 

In his usual humourous undertone, Navalny added, “They turned me from a ‘technically alive human being’ into someone who has high chances to become … a man who can quickly scroll Instagram and understands without thinking where to put his likes.”

ALSO READ| Navalny aides say Novichok traces found in Russian hotel

Earlier in the week, aides of the Russian opposition politician said they discovered traces of a Novichok nerve agent on a bottle taken from the hotel where he stayed before falling ill in a suspected poisoning attack.  

Novichok disrupts communication between the brain, the main organs and muscles, while doctors say it gradually clears from the body.

Though Navalny supporters point to a state-ordered crime, the Russian authorities have denied all involvement in the poisoning.

Russia insists its medical tests did not detect any poison in Navalny’s body.

It says it lacks grounds for a criminal investigation, despite international calls for a transparent probe.

On September 3, Germany announced that medical tests from a military chemical weapons laboratory had found “unequivocal evidence” of the nerve agent.