Russia poisoned Alexei Navalny with frog poison, European countries say – The Mercury News
By JILL THE LAWLESS | The Associated Press
LONDON – Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned in the Kremlin by a rare and deadly poison found in the skin of poisonous frogs, five European countries said on Saturday.
The foreign ministers of the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands said that analysis of samples taken from Navalny’s body “completely confirmed the presence of epibatidine.” A neurotoxin found in the skin of dart frogs in South America that is not found naturally in Russia, they said.
A joint statement said: “Russia had the means, the motive and the opportunity to drink this poison.”
The five countries said they reported 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 approached.
Navalny, who fought official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests as President Vladimir Putin’s worst enemy, died at an Arctic prison on Feb. 16, 2024, while he was serving a 19-year sentence that he believed was politically motivated.
“Russia saw Navalny as a threat,” said British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper. “By using this kind of poison, the Russian regime has shown the disgusting tools it has and the deep fear it has of political opposition.”
The poisoning of Navalny shows that “Vladimir Putin is willing to use biological weapons against his own people to stay in power,” wrote French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot in X.
Navalny’s widow said last year that two independent laboratories found that her husband was poisoned shortly before his death. She has repeatedly blamed Putin for her husband’s death. Russian officials have strongly denied the allegations.
Yulia Navalnaya said on Saturday that she was “sure from day one” that her husband was poisoned, “but now there is proof.”
“Putin killed Alexei with a chemical weapon,” he wrote on the social network X. He said Putin was a “murderer” who must “answer.”
Russian authorities said the politician fell ill after the trip and died of natural causes.
Epibatidine is found naturally in dart frogs in the wild, and can also be made in a lab, which European scientists suspect was the case used in Navalny. It acts on the body in the same way as nerve agents, causing shortness of breath, convulsions, fainting, slow heart rate and eventually death.
Navalny was previously targeted for poisoning in 2020, with a nerve agent in an attack he blamed on the Kremlin, which has always denied involvement. His family and friends are fighting for him to be taken 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 repeating the international ban on chemical and biological weapons. It blames the Kremlin for the 2018 attack in the English city of Salisbury that targeted former Russian intelligence chief Sergei Skripal and the Novichok nerve agent. Skripal and his daughter became seriously ill, and a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after coming into contact with a discarded bottle containing nerve traces.
A British investigation concluded that the attack “must have been authorized at the highest level, by President Putin.”
The Kremlin has denied involvement. Russia has also denied poisoning Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian agent turned Kremlin critic who died in London in 2006 after ingesting the radioactive isotope polonium-210. A British investigation concluded that two Russian agents killed Litvinenko, and that Putin “probably agreed” to the operation.
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Associated Press writer John Leicester in Paris contributed to this story.
