Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in prison two years ago, was most likely poisoned by a toxin found in a South American frog, the Foreign Ministries of Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands said on Saturday in a joint statement.
Samples taken from Mr. Navalny’s body showed the presence of a toxic substance, epibatidine, the statement said.
“Epibatidine is a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America. It is not found naturally in Russia,” the statement said.
The findings directly challenge the official account from the Russian authorities, which was that he died of natural causes. Instead, the statement said, the presence of a foreign toxin shows that Russian authorities most likely killed Mr. Navalny, who was the government’s most prominent political opponent when he died in a maximum-security prison in the Russian Arctic in 2024.
“Navalny died while held in prison, meaning Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison to him,” the joint statement said. It was also clear evidence that Russia has not ended its use of chemical weapons, disregarding international law, the statement added.
Aides to Mr. Navalny have said that he was close to being released in a prisoner exchange with the West when he died. They argued that by killing him, the Kremlin would have removed Mr. Navalny from consideration in the exchange negotiations. Russia and Belarus ended up releasing 16 people, including several political prisoners and the American journalist Evan Gershkovich, in an exchange in August 2024.
News reports said in 2024 that U.S. intelligence officials did not believe that the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, personally ordered Mr. Navalny’s death, even as they saw him as ultimately responsible because of the conditions that Mr. Navalny had to endure after his imprisonment in early 2021. The U.S. government did not immediately comment on the statement by the five European countries.
Yulia Navalnaya, Mr. Navalny’s widow, speaking to reporters on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference, described the report as validation of the Navalny team’s longstanding assertion that Mr. Putin was personally responsible for Mr. Navalny’s death.
“I want to repeat: Vladimir Putin killed my husband, Aleksei Navalny, using a chemical weapon,” she said. “Of course, it’s not news that Vladimir Putin is a killer, but now we have yet another direct piece of proof.”
Russia announced Mr. Navalny’s death on Feb. 16, 2024, just as that year’s Munich Security Conference was opening. Ms. Navalnaya gave a dramatic speech to the conference on that day, pledging that Mr. Putin would pay for “what they have done to our country, to my family and to my husband.”
Russia released Mr. Navalny’s body to his mother after a weeklong battle over custody of his remains. Last September, Ms. Navalnaya said that her team had managed to transfer some biological samples from his body abroad, and that two laboratories had found that he was poisoned, but she did not provide more details about those conclusions.
She said that a photograph of her husband’s prison cell showed vomit on the floor on the day he died, and that excerpts from official incident reports submitted by five prison officials suggested that he suffered heavy vomiting and convulsions shortly before he died.
Six months after his death, Russia’s Investigative Committee refused to open a criminal investigation into Mr. Navalny’s death, and said in a report that a combination of medical factors had killed him. In a report to his family, the committee listed hypertension, chronic hepatitis and a damaged vertebrae as contributing to his death. An increase in blood had disturbed his regular heart rhythm and overloaded his heart, the committee found. One of Mr. Navalny’s former doctors described the diagnosis as “implausible.”
In 2020, Mr. Navalny survived an attempted assassination by poisoning, when he collapsed on a flight to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk. After recuperating, Mr. Navalny said he had found evidence that Russian security agents had targeted him with a nerve agent.
Lynsey Chutel is a Times reporter based in London who covers breaking news in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
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