A court in Russia has ruled that a jailed former top manager of the disbanded oil group Yukos cannot be transferred to a clinic for treatment.
Vasily Aleksanyan, 36, is reported to be suffering from Aids.
He was detained in 2006 on suspicion of embezzlement. He was deputy to the Yukos founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is also in prison.
Mr Khodorkovsky, whose firm was crippled by tax demands, says he is on hunger strike to support Mr Aleksanyan.
He says officials are punishing Mr Aleksanyan for refusing to sign false confessions.
'Moral choice'
In a letter posted on his supporters' website on Wednesday, Mr Khodorkovsky said Mr Aleksanyan had been refused medication and deliberately placed in poor conditions.
He said he had no choice but to "abandon the legal framework" and start a hunger strike.
"I am facing an impossible moral choice: admit to crimes I haven't committed and save the life of a man, but destroy the fate of innocents who will be charged as my accomplices," he said.
Mr Aleksanyan says he has developed serious health complications and is nearly blind.
Russia's human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin has called for an independent medical examination of Mr Aleksanyan.
Mr Khodorkovsky, the founder of Yukos and once Russia's richest man, is serving an eight-year sentence at a prison camp in Siberia.
His supporters have always said that his arrest was punishment for his support of pro-Western opposition political parties.
Mr Khodorkovsky's international lawyer Robert Amsterdam said Russia was "flouting not only international law but the norms of morality".
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