Deputy head physician at Omsk hospital that treated Alexey Navalny has resigned ‘for personal reasons’

The deputy head physician at the Omsk hospital that briefly treated opposition figure Alexey Navalny in August has resigned “for personal reasons,” according to the news agency RIA Novosti. Anatoly Kalinichenko told the website Ngs55.ru that his decision to take a job elsewhere is apolitical and due simply to the fact that he’d grown tired of administrative work. He just wants to return to surgery, he says.

Navalny was hospitalized at Kalinichenko’s facility on August 20 after his flight from Tomsk to Moscow made an emergency landing in Omsk. While he remained at the Omsk hospital until the evening of August 21, Kalinichenko was the primary source of information for journalists reporting on Navalny’s medical condition.

Kalinichenko was one of the hospital officials who claimed that doctors found no traces of poison in Navalny’s system and argued that the politician’s fragile state prevented his immediate transfer to a better-equipped clinic in Berlin.