OMSK: Russian doctors treating opposition figure Alexei Navalny for suspected poisoning backed down on Friday and agreed he could be evacuated after his family and aides battled for him to be taken to Germany. The doctors in the Siberian city of Omsk, where Navalny was in a coma in intensive care, changed tack after initially insisting he was too ill to be moved.

The 44-year-old lawyer and anti-corruption campaigner's wife had appealed to President Vladimir Putin and staff had accused authorities of putting his life at risk by delaying the evacuation. "We... took the decision that we do not oppose his transfer to another hospital, the one that his relatives indicate to us," the deputy chief doctor of the Omsk hospital, Anatoly Kalinichenko, told journalists.

He said Navalny's condition had "stabilised" and his wife and brother "took the risks on themselves" for moving him. "It won't happen instantly, it will happen today," he said. German doctors who flew in on an air ambulance visited Navalny earlier Friday and the NGO that chartered the plane, the Cinema for Peace foundation, said they were "able and willing" to fly him to Berlin.

The turnaround followed a letter from Navalny's wife Yulia with a direct appeal to Putin and after aides asked the European Court of Human Rights to intervene with the Russian government. Navalny, who is among Putin's fiercest critics, lost consciousness while on a flight on Thursday and his plane made an emergency landing in Omsk.