Russia on Monday denied allegations it killed former Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2024 with a poison derived from a dart frog toxin.
“Naturally, we do not accept such accusations. We disagree with them. We consider them biased and not based on anything. And we strongly reject them,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, according to Reuters.
Russia’s response comes two years to the day that Navalny died in a Siberian penal colony, with the United Kingdom and some European allies using the anniversary to announce findings from an analysis of samples from his body after his family’s prolonged fight to reclaim it following his death.
Through a press conference on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, in addition to a joint statement, the U.K., France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden announced “only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin to target Navalny” and “we hold it responsible for his death.”
“Epibatidine can be found naturally in dart frogs in the wild in South America,” the countries wrote. “Dart frogs in captivity do not produce this toxin and it is not found naturally in Russia. There is no innocent explanation for its presence in Navalny’s body.”
Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who has remained adamant that Russia “murdered” her husband, welcomed the news and expressed her gratitude for the investigation, despite her grief.
“I was certain from the first day that my husband had been poisoned, but now there is proof: [Russian President Vladimir] Putin killed Alexei with [a] chemical weapon,” she wrote on X. “Putin is a murderer. He must be held accountable for all his crimes.”
Navalnaya announced Navalny’s death at the Munich Security Conference in 2024 amid claims from Russia that Putin’s most prominent domestic critic died of “natural causes” after he took a short walk at the penal colony, to which he had only been recently transferred, before he reported feeling unwell, collapsed, and never regained consciousness.
Russia has previously been accused of poisoning Navalny with the prohibited nerve agent Novichok in 2020, from which the anti-corruption activist and politician recovered in Germany until his return and arrest in Russia in 2021 on trumped-up charges.
