Navalny says he can walk and recognize people as he eyes ‘clear road’ to recovery from poisoning

Navalny posted a picture of himself walking down a staircase on Saturday, writing that he is regaining his physical and mental capacity.”Quite recently, I did not recognize people and did not understand how to talk,” Navalny wrote. “Every morning the doctor came to me and said: Alexey, 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.”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.’ And before, I would have just stood there and stared at it blankly,” the post added.In the post, Navalny thanked the doctors of the Charité Hospital in Berlin, where he is undergoing treatment. The German government has said the Kremlin critic was poisoned with a chemical agent from the Novichok group, a conclusion supported by two other labs in France and Sweden.Earlier this week, his team issued a statement saying that German specialists found traces of the nerve agent on a water bottle taken from Navalny’s hotel room in Tomsk, Russia.Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Friday questioned the water bottle as evidence and added that poisoning is one version of what happened to Navalny but it has not been confirmed as traces of poison were not found in Navalny’s blood by Russian labs. Mary Ilyushina reported from Moscow, Rob Picheta wrote in London.