Five European countries accused Russia of poisoning opposition politician Alexei Navalny on Saturday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
“The U.K., Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands are confident that Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a lethal toxin,” the countries said in a joint statement following “analyses of samples” from his body.
The staunch critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin died in an Arctic prison in February 2024, while serving a 19-year prison sentence.
The epibatidine toxin found in the skin of dart frogs native to South America was found in samples and “highly likely resulted in his death,” the European states said.
“Only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin to target Navalny during his imprisonment in a Russian penal colony in Siberia, and we hold it responsible for his death,” the U.K. Foreign Office added in a statement.
Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnya said it was now “science-proven” that the Kremlin opponent had been murdered.
“Two years ago, I came on stage here and said that it was Vladimir Putin who killed my husband,” Navalnaya said on the sidelines of the conference.
“I was, of course, certain that it was a murder…Back then, it was just words, but today these words have become science-proven facts,” Navalnaya added.
Navalnaya said last September that laboratory analysis of smuggled biological samples found that her husband was killed by poisoning.
“Today, beside his widow, the U.K. is shining a light on the Kremlin’s barbaric plot to silence [Navalny’s] voice,” U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, who met Navalnaya while attending the Munich conference, said in a statement.
The countries said they had reported Russia to the world’s chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, over the finding.
“We are further concerned that Russia did not destroy all of its chemical weapons,” the countries said, accusing Moscow of breaching the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Navalny was previously poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok in 2020 while campaigning in Siberia and was flown to Germany on an emergency evacuation flight, where he spent months recovering.
The charismatic anti-corruption campaigner had rallied hundreds of thousands across Russia in anti-Kremlin protests as he exposed the alleged ill-gotten gains of Putin’s inner circle.
