European Governments: Navalny Likely Poisoned
- 4 hours ago
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By Molly Lukas
Nearly two years after Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony, Western governments now say what many long suspected: Russia’s most prominent dissident did not simply collapse behind bars. He was almost certainly killed. Navalny was the country’s leading anti-corruption campaigner in the 2010s and early 2020s. He rose to national prominence by publishing investigations alleging vast corruption among senior Russian officials and state-linked oligarchs, often through his Anti-Corruption Foundation. Navalny organized mass protests across Russia, and ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013.
On Saturday, the governments of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands released the findings of a joint toxicological investigation into the death of Alexei Navalny. Navalny was likely poisoned with epibatidine, a highly potent neurotoxin derived from South American poison dart frogs, a substance that does not occur naturally in Russia.
Navalny died inside the remote “Polar Wolf” penal colony, where he was serving a sentence on charges widely dismissed by Western governments and human rights organizations as politically contrived. In a coordinated statement, the five governments stressed the obvious implication: a prisoner in state custody does not ingest an exotic toxin by accident. The Russian state, they argued, possessed the means and motive. The Kremlin offered no immediate response.
Days before his death, Navalny appeared in court videos in good spirits. Yet reports from the prison described sudden paralysis, acute pain, and respiratory failure. These symptoms are consistent, investigators say, with epibatidine poisoning. Biological samples, obtained by Navalny’s family and shared with European authorities, formed the basis of the independent analysis. It was not the first time he survived an apparent attempt on his life. In 2020, Navalny was airlifted to Berlin after being poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent. Moscow once again denied responsibility.
For over a decade, Navalny exposed alleged corruption at the highest levels of Russian power, building a following that made him the most formidable domestic critic of President Vladimir Putin. His imprisonment followed a trial condemned abroad as politically motivated. His confinement included prolonged isolation in one of Russia’s harshest facilities.
At this year's Munich Security Conference, held from February 13th to 15th, Yulia Navalnaya directly accused Vladimir Putin of the death of her husband. “He must be held accountable,” she wrote. Western governments echoed the sentiment in more diplomatic language, accusing the Russian state of once again demonstrating the lengths to which it will go to silence dissent.
Image Source 1: The Guardian
Image source 2: McGill University