Alexei Navalny moved to prison hospital with ‘respiratory illness’

Alexei Navalny has been moved to a medical facility to be treated for a possible respiratory illness and has been tested for Covid-19, a Russian newspaper has reported.

Mr Navalny, a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, had said earlier that he had a high temperature and bad cough.

The 44-year-old said three of the 15 inmates in his Russian prison ward were being treated in hospital for tuberculosis and joked darkly that catching the disease might offer him relief from his other ailments.

"If I have tuberculosis, then maybe it'll chase out the pain in my back and numbness in my legs. That'd be nice," he wrote on Instagram.