Five European countries, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, have accused Russia of using a toxin extracted from poison dart frogs to kill Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny.
European allies said on Saturday that Navalny was poisoned while being held in an Arctic penal colony two years ago, a claim that Moscow has dismissed as propaganda.
Navalny, 47, died in February 2024 in an Arctic prison where he was serving a sentence after being found guilty of extremism and other charges, which he denied. Russian authorities said he fell ill after a walk and died of natural causes.
What did European countries say?
In a joint statement, the five countries said that analyses of samples from Navalny's body had "conclusively" confirmed the presence of epibatidine, a toxin found in South American poison dart frogs and not naturally occurring in Russia.
According to the statement, given the toxicity of epibatidine and the reported symptoms, poisoning was the most likely cause of his death. The countries also stressed that the case underscores the need to hold Russia accountable for violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.
It is not clear how the European allies obtained the samples from Navalny's body.
What are dart frogs?
Epibatidine is a neurotoxin secreted by small, colorful frogs that live in the tropical forests of South America. European scientists suspect that the substance used against Navalny was produced in a laboratory.
The toxin acts similarly to nerve agents, causing difficulty breathing, convulsions, seizures, slowed heart rate and, ultimately, death.
Russia's reaction
The Russian government dismissed the accusations as a “Western propaganda hoax,” according to the state-run TASS news agency. The Russian embassy in London responded with irony, saying: “One has to ask what kind of person would believe this nonsense about a frog.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow would comment only after the full test results were published, calling all claims until then propaganda to divert attention from the West's problems.
Who was Alexey Navalny?
Navalny was one of the most prominent figures in the Russian opposition. He rose to fame in 2008 by exposing corruption in state-owned companies such as Gazprom and Rosneft. He later founded anti-corruption projects and organizations that exposed abuses at the highest levels of Russian power.
In 2020, he was the target of another nerve agent poisoning, which he blamed on the Kremlin. After returning to Russia from Germany, where he was treated, he was immediately arrested and spent the last three years of his life in prison.
His death was announced shortly before the opening of the 2024 Munich Security Conference, where his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, demanded that Russian President Vladimir Putin be held accountable.
"I was convinced from day one that my husband was poisoned, but now there is proof," she declared, thanking European states for the two-year investigation that, according to her, revealed the truth. /tvklan.al
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