Kremlin says it won't respond to call from wife of jailed Kremlin critic Navalny to free him for medical reasons

[March 26, 2021]    MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Kremlin said on Friday it would not respond to a call by jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny's wife to have her husband freed to receive urgent medical treatment.

 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his wife Yulia Navalnaya are seen on board a plane during a flight from Berlin to Moscow, January 17, 2021. REUTERS/Maria Vasilyeva/

Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of President Vladimir Putin's most prominent critic, called on Thursday for her husband to be immediately released and treated by doctors he trusted after his lawyers said he was in pain and being denied proper healthcare.

On Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call that her comments were a matter for the state prison service, not the Kremlin.

Peskov also said that Russian citizens held in foreign prisons were faced with much harsher and more inhumane situations than anything faced by Navalny.

(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov and Andrew Osborn; writing by Tom Balmforth; editing by Andrew Osborn)

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