Russia formally rejects Navalny poisoning allegations, arguing that frog toxin falls outside chemical weapons watchdog’s remit
Russia has formally rejected allegations by five European countries that opposition leader Alexey Navalny was fatally poisoned while in prison, Moscow’s permanent representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said on Tuesday.
The Russian representative, Vladimir Tarabrin, told the state news agency TASS that Moscow had submitted a note to the OPCW Technical Secretariat for distribution among all member states. “We categorically rejected the absurd insinuations against us. At the same time, we noted that the Russian Federation is always ready for a substantive expert discussion based on facts,” Tarabrin said.
On February 14, the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Germany, and the Netherlands issued a joint statement saying that Navalny was killed using epibatidine, a rare neurotoxin derived from a poisonous frog, and accusing Russia of violating the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).
Based in The Hague, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is the implementing body for the CWC. However, Tarabrin argued that epibatidine and similar toxins “cannot be a subject of discussion within the OPCW” because they fall under the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention rather than the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Russian officials have dismissed the poisoning allegations as biased and unfounded, claiming they were “planted” to distract from domestic issues in the West. “Naturally, we do not accept such accusations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday. “And we strongly reject them.”
