LONDON — Five European countries said on Saturday that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned by the Kremlin with a rare and deadly toxic substance found in the skin of poisonous frogs.
The foreign ministries of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands said that analysis of samples taken from Navalny’s body “conclusively confirmed the presence of epibatidine.” They said it is a neurotoxin found in the skin of dart frogs in South America and not found naturally in Russia.
“Russia has the means, motive and opportunity to use this poison,” the countries said in a joint statement. They said they would report Russia to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for violating the Chemical Weapons Convention.
The announcement came as Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya attended the Munich Security Conference in Germany as the second anniversary of Navalny’s death approaches.
Navalny, who campaigned against official corruption and organized mass anti-Kremlin protests as President Vladimir Putin’s arch enemy, died in an Arctic penal colony on February 16, 2024. He was serving a 19-year prison sentence believed to be politically motivated.
British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “Russia considers Navalny a threat.” He added: “By using this kind of poison, the Russian state demonstrated the vile tools at its disposal and the extreme fear it has of political opposition.”
Navalny’s widow said last year that two independent laboratories had discovered that her husband had been poisoned shortly before his death. Navalnaya has repeatedly blamed Putin for Navalny’s death, something Russian officials have strongly denied.
Navalnaya said on Saturday that she was “sure from day one” that her husband died of poisoning, “but now there is proof.”
“Putin killed Alexei with a chemical weapon,” she wrote on the social networking site X, describing Putin as a “murderer” who “must be held accountable.”
Russian authorities said that the politician fell ill after walking and died of natural causes.
Epibatidine is found naturally in wild frogs, and can also be made in the laboratory, which European scientists suspect is happening with the substance used to treat Navalny. It acts on the body in a similar way as nerve agents, causing shortness of breath, convulsions, seizures, slowed heart rate, and eventually death.
Navalny was the target of a previous poisoning in 2020, with a nerve agent in an attack he blamed on the Kremlin, which has always denied involvement. His family and allies did their best to fly him to Germany for treatment and recovery. Five months later, he returned to Russia, where he was immediately arrested and imprisoned for the last three years of his life.
The UK has accused Russia of repeatedly violating the international ban on chemical and biological weapons. The Kremlin was accused of carrying out a 2018 attack in the English city of Salisbury that targeted former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal with the Novichok nerve agent. A British investigation concluded that the attack “must have been approved at the highest level by President Putin.”
The Kremlin denied involvement.
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