European governments said Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with epibatidine, a rare toxin linked to poison dart frogs, and they reported Russia to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, according to statements issued Feb. 14.
In a joint announcement, the foreign ministries of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands said lab analysis of samples taken from Navalny’s body “conclusively confirmed the presence of epibatidine.” The governments said the neurotoxin is secreted by dart frogs and is not found naturally in Russia.
The governments also said they were reporting Russia for a breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention. There was no immediate comment from the organization.
Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony on Feb. 16, 2024, while serving a 19-year sentence he believed was politically motivated. The AP report said Navalny had become President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest opponent, crusading against official corruption and staging large anti-Kremlin protests.
British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said the Russian government treated Navalny as a threat, and she tied the poisoning to the state’s fear of opposition. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot wrote on X that Navalny’s poisoning showed President Vladimir Putin was prepared to use biological weapons against his own people to remain in power.
European officials said they had a high degree of confidence in their assessment that Navalny died from epibatidine poisoning. When asked why it took so long for the results to be released, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said it was “a complicated process,” and he also said “no one but Putin’s henchmen” would be able to say in detail what happened on Feb. 16, 2024, in the Russian penal colony—adding that Russian authorities had “the possibility, the motive and the means” to administer the poison.
The announcement came as Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, attended the Munich Security Conference in Germany and arrived just before the second anniversary of Navalny’s death. Navalnaya said last year that two independent labs found that her husband was poisoned shortly before he died, and she has repeatedly blamed Putin for his death, while Russian officials have denied her accusation.
Speaking after the European announcement, Navalnaya said she had been “certain from the first day” that her husband had been poisoned, but that “now there is proof.” In written statements, she accused Putin of killing Navalny with chemical weapons and said he “must be held accountable.”
The AP report said epibatidine occurs naturally in dart frogs, and can also be manufactured in a lab. It described the toxin as working on the body in a similar way to nerve agents, with effects that include shortness of breath, convulsions, seizures, a slowed heart rate and ultimately death.
The governments’ assessment also recalled that Navalny was the target of an earlier poisoning in 2020, when he said he was attacked with a nerve agent that he blamed on the Kremlin. After treatment and recovery in Germany, he returned to Russia, where he was arrested and imprisoned for the last years of his life.
The European statements also referenced a broader series of past poisonings that Western governments have attributed to Russia, including a 2018 attack in Salisbury that targeted former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal with the nerve agent Novichok, and a British inquiry conclusion that it “must have been authorized at the highest level, by President Putin.” The report said Sergei Skripal and his daughter became seriously ill, and a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after contact with material containing traces of the nerve agent. It added that the Kremlin denied involvement.
The report similarly noted that Russia denied involvement in the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London after he ingested polonium-210, a British inquiry that concluded two Russian agents killed Litvinenko and that Putin “probably approved” the operation.