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Five European countries announced on Saturday that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had been poisoned by the Kremlin with a deadly toxin derived from poison dart frog skin.
The foreign ministries of Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands said that analysis of samples from Navalny, who died on February 16, 2024, “conclusively confirmed the presence of epibatidine.” This is a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America, and is not found naturally in Russia.
“Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison,” the two countries said in a joint statement. They said they were reporting Russia to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for violating the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Navalny was President Vladimir Putin’s biggest enemy, rooting out corruption in the authorities and leading massive anti-Kremlin protests, before dying in a penal colony in the Arctic in February 2024. He was serving a 19-year sentence in what he believed was politically motivated.
British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “Russia saw Mr Navalny as a threat.” “By using this form of poison, the Russian state demonstrated the despicable means at its disposal and its overwhelming fear of political opposition.”
Alexei Navalny, who died in Russian custody in an Arctic penal colony, is remembered as a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, who was a frequent target of Navalny’s blog posts about corruption and the lavish lifestyles of the country’s elite.
Navalny’s poisoning “demonstrates President Vladimir Putin’s readiness to use biological weapons against his own people in order to maintain power,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrault wrote on social media platform X.
Mr Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, said last year that two independent laboratories had determined that her husband had been poisoned shortly before his death. Navalny has repeatedly blamed President Putin for Navalny’s death, a charge that Russian officials vehemently deny.
Navalnaya said on Saturday that she had been “convinced from day one” that her husband had been poisoned, “but now we have proof.”
“Putin killed Alexei with chemical weapons,” she wrote to X, calling Putin a “murderer” and “must be held accountable.”
Russian authorities said the politician fell ill after a walk and died of natural causes.
Epibatidine occurs naturally in poison dart frogs in the wild and can also be produced in the laboratory, and European scientists suspect this is the case with the substance used on Mr. Navalny. It acts on the body like a nerve agent, causing shortness of breath, convulsions, seizures, slowed heart rate, and ultimately death.
Navalny was the target of a nerve agent poisoning in 2020, which he blamed on the Kremlin, which has always denied involvement. His family and allies fought to get him flown to Germany for treatment and recovery.
Five months later, he returned to Russia, but was soon arrested and imprisoned for the last three years.
Alexei Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya has laid the blame for her husband’s death squarely at the feet of Vladimir Putin, vowing to continue his fight “for a free Russia” and calling on his supporters to join him.
Britain has accused Russia of repeatedly flouting the international ban on biological and chemical weapons. The government has accused the Kremlin of carrying out an attack with the nerve agent Novichok that targeted former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England in 2018.
The British investigation concluded that the attack “must have been authorized at the highest levels by President Putin.”
The Kremlin denies involvement.