Alexei Navalny (C), pictured speaking during an unauthorized rally against the re-election of President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in 2018, was poisoned by the Russian government with a lethal toxin found in South American frogs, five European nations on Saturday said that laboratory test findings show. File Photo by Dmitry Serebryakov/EPA-EFE
Russia is responsible for the 2024 poisoning death of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny while he was imprisoned after blaming a previous attempt on his life on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Navalny died after being poisoned with epibatidine, a deadly toxin found in the skin of wild dart frogs in South America, a death which five European governments said on Saturday could only have been caused by Russia because he was imprisoned in a penal colony in Siberia.
The United Kingdom, alongside Sweden, France, the Netherlands and Germany, has reported the poisoning to the Organization for the prohibition of Chemical Weapons as a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, the five nations said in a joint press release.
The finding was made after laboratory testing of smuggled samples from Navalny’s body and his cell, confirming findings from two other laboratories on the samples revealed in September 2025.
“Only the Russian government had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin against Alexei Navalny during his imprisonment in Russia,” U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said in the release.
“Russia saw Navalny as a threat,” Cooper said. “By using this form of poison, the Russian state demonstrated the despicable tools it has at its disposal and the overwhelming fear it has of political opposition.”
The announcement comes exactly two years after Navalny’s death at a Russian penal colony near Salekhard, a city located more than 1,900 miles northeast of Moscow and beyond the Arctic Circle.
Russia’s Federal Prison Service at the time said that 47-year-old Navalny had reported not feeling well after a walk, during which he lost consciousness.
Supporters, as well as his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, have maintained that Navalny had been poisoned by Russia to silence his opposition to Putin’s decades long rule.
Navalnaya in September released images and video from days before Navalny’s death in which he appeared to be healthy, revealing that lab tests had confirmed he’d been poisoned — but at the time did not reveal the labs, the type of poison or what countries had conducted the testing.
“I was certain from the first day that my husband had been poisoned, but now there is proof: Putin killed Alexei with [a] chemical weapon,” Navalnaya wrote Saturday in a post on X.
“I am grateful to the European states for the meticulous work they carried out over two years and for uncovering the truth,” she wrote.
Navalny had previously survived at least two attempted poisonings that were also blamed on Putin’s government, including in 2021 when he was evacuated to Germany after exposure to the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok.
Navalny and Navalnaya blamed Putin, resulting in Navalny’s arrest when he returned to Russia and he was sentenced to a 30-year jail term on charges of extremism and fraud.
According to the U.K. Foreign Office, Navalny was exposed to epibatidine before he died in prison, a lethal toxin found in the skin of wild dart frogs in Ecuador, among other South American countries.
Dart frogs in captivity, however, do not produce the toxin and the frogs are not naturally found in Russia.
“There is no innocent explanation for its presence in Navalny’s body,” the Foreign Office said.
The U.K. also noted in Saturday’s announcement that “it is clear” that Russia did not destroy all of its chemical weapons in 2017 — as it had claimed — nor has it renounced the use of biological weapons, based on people targeted in Britain where Novichok was used in 2018 by Russia and its use of chemical weapons during its war on Ukraine.
This week in Washington
President Donald Trump speaks alongside Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Lee Zeldin in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Thursday. The Trump administration has announced the finalization of rules that revoke the EPA’s ability to regulate climate pollution by ending the endangerment finding that determined six greenhouse gases could be categorized as dangerous to human health. Photo by Will Oliver/UPI | License Photo
