Russia killed opposition leader Alexey Navalny using a rare dart frog toxin, five European countries say
Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny was killed in prison using a rare dart frog toxin, five European countries said in a joint statement on February 14.
According to reporting by The Insider, samples taken from the late opposition politician following his death in 2024 were smuggled abroad and found to contain the lethal toxin epibatidine. The outlet reports that experts from several laboratories, working independently, reached the same conclusion after analyzing the samples.
Representatives of five countries — the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Germany, and the Netherlands — whose laboratories examined Navalny’s samples have issued a joint statement accusing Russia of violating the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). The statement, coordinated by the five countries’ foreign ministers and published on the British government’s website, stresses that natural exposure to epibatidine in Russia is impossible.
“Navalny died while held in prison, meaning Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison to him,” the statement reads. “We and our partners will make use of all policy levers at our disposal to continue to hold Russia to account.”
The statement adds that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has been notified of Russia’s violation of the CWC.
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Epibatidine was first identified in 1974. It was extracted from the skin of a South American poison dart frog, Epipedobates tricolor, and later synthesized in laboratories. It is a powerful neurotoxin that acts on key receptors in the transmission of pain signals, as well as movement and other bodily functions. The toxin causes numbness throughout the body, which can rapidly progress to complete paralysis. Doses become fatal if the paralysis leads to respiratory arrest, according to The Insider.
“The publicly available information about Alexey Navalny’s symptoms corresponds to what is known about the effects of epibatidine,” Alexander Polupan, the intensive care physician who treated Navalny after his Novichok poisoning in 2020, told The Insider.
Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, announced in September 2025 that laboratory tests in two Western countries had confirmed independently that her husband was fatally poisoned in prison. At the time, she said that the laboratories had refused to release the toxicology results due to unspecified “political concerns.”
“I was certain from the first day that my husband had been poisoned, but now there is proof: Putin killed Alexey with a chemical weapon,” Navalnaya wrote on X on February 14. “I am grateful to the European states for the meticulous work they carried out over two years and for uncovering the truth. Vladimir Putin is a murderer. He must be held accountable for all his crimes.”
