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Navalny Was Poisoned With Frog Toxin, European Governments Say
The toxin was found in the body of the Russian dissident Aleksei A. Navalny, who died in prison two years ago, five governments said, challenging Russia’s official account.
Aleksei A. Navalny was most likely poisoned by a toxin found in a South American frog, five European countries said on Saturday, making the most concrete Western accusation yet that Russia’s leading opposition figure was murdered by his government in an Arctic prison two years ago.
Samples taken from Mr. Navalny’s body showed the presence of a toxic substance, epibatidine, according to a statement released by the foreign ministries of Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.
“Epibatidine is a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America. It is not found naturally in Russia,” the statement read.
“Only the Russian government had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin against Alexei Navalny during his imprisonment in Russia,” it read.
The finding directly challenges Russia’s official account of Mr. Navalny’s death, which was that he died of natural causes. Instead, the statement said, the presence of a foreign toxin shows that the 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.
It was also clear evidence that Russia has not ended its use of chemical weapons, disregarding international law, the statement added.
Maria V. Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, dismissed the statement as a “P.R. campaign to deflect attention from pressing issues in the West.” She told the state-owned Tass news agency that the Kremlin would not comment in detail about the poisoning accusation until it had seen detailed test results.
The U.S. government did not immediately comment on the European countries’ statement.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said poisoning political opponents was characteristic of Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin, along with invading neighboring countries and silencing journalists. She called Mr. Navalny’s death “a cowardly act from a frightened leader.”
“Russia has long acted as a terrorist state, relying on terrorist methods,” Ms. von der Leyen said on social media. “This is the true face of Russia today.”
Yulia Navalnaya, Mr. Navalny’s widow, speaking to reporters on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference, described the European countries’ statement 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.”
Russian scientists have experimented with synthesizing epibatidine, according to a research paper published in a Russian scientific journal in 2013. Some of those experiments were carried out by scientists employed by a Russian state research institute that developed the Novichok nerve agent before the breakup of the Soviet Union.
That institute, the Russian Scientific Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology, was tasked with supervising the destruction of Russian chemical weapons such as Novichok at the end of the Cold War.
The 2013 paper did not refer to using epibatidine as a poison, instead calling it a “non-opioid analgesic,” which, unlike an opioid, would not cause an addiction.
In 2020, Mr. Navalny survived an attempted assassination by poisoning when he collapsed on a flight to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk. As he recovered in Berlin, the German authorities said he had been poisoned with Novichok, which also was used against Sergei V. Skripal, a former Soviet spy, and his daughter in a 2018 attack in England. They survived.
The Russian scientific institute was sanctioned by the European Union in connection with the 2020 poisoning of Mr. Navalny, and what the bloc described as its role in continuing to develop Novichok, even after it was supposed to be destroying chemical weapons. Russian officials denied that accusation.
Aides to Mr. Navalny have said that when Mr. Navalny died, he was close to being released in a prisoner exchange with the West. They argued that by killing him, the Kremlin would have removed Mr. Navalny as a factor in the negotiations over the exchange. 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 Mr. Putin had personally ordered Mr. Navalny’s death, though they saw him as ultimately responsible because of the conditions Mr. Navalny had endured since his imprisonment in early 2021.
Russia released Mr. Navalny’s body to his mother after a weeklong battle over custody of his remains. Last September, his widow, Ms. Navalnaya, said 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. It 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.”
After Mr. Navalny’s 2020 poisoning, he released a video of himself — posing as an aide to a senior Russian security official — extracting a confession from one of his would-be assassins, essentially confirming the involvement of the Russian intelligence services. He was told the poison had been planted in his underwear at his hotel sometime before he boarded the plane.
He flew back to Russia knowing he was likely to be arrested on his return. He was arrested as soon as he landed.
Mr. Navalny was given multiple prison sentences that would most likely have kept him locked up at least until 2031. Despite harsh conditions, including repeated stints in solitary confinement, he maintained a presence on social media while members of his team who were in exile continued to publish investigations into corruption among Russia’s elite.
Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.
Lynsey Chutel is a Times reporter based in London who covers breaking news in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
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