NPR
5 European nations say Alexei Navalny was poisoned and blame the Kremlin
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The Associated Press
FILE - Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny speaks to the media in front of security officers standing guard at the Foundation for Fighting Corruption office in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Dec. 26, 2019. Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP hide caption
LONDON — Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned by the Kremlin with a lethal toxin the skin of poison dart frogs, five European countries said Saturday.
The foreign ministries of the U.K., France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands said analysis of samples confirmed the presence of epibatidine." It is a found in dart frogs in South America that is not found naturally in Russia, they said.
joint statement "Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison." They said they were reporting Russia to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for a breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
"Russia saw Navalny as a using this form of poison the Russian state demonstrated the despicable tools it has at its disposal and the overwhelming fear it has of political opposition."
NPR's Book of the Day 'Patriot' is a posthumous memoir by the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in in
Navalny's said last year that two independent labs had found that her husband was poisoned shortly before he died. has repeatedly blamed Putin for Russian officials have vehemently
Navalnaya said Saturday that she had been "certain from the first day" that her husband had been poisoned, "but now there is proof."
"Putin killed Alexei with chemical weapon," she wrote on social network Putin "a murderer" who "must be held accountable."
Russian authorities said that the politician became ill after a walk and died from natural causes.
Consider This from NPR Even in death, Alexei Navalny hasn't given up the fight against corruption in Russia Navalny was with a nerve agent attack he blamed on the Kremlin, which always denied involvement. His family and allies fought to have him flown to Germany for treatment and recovery. Five months later, he returned to Russia, where he was immediately arrested and imprisoned for the last three years of his life.
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Epibatidine is found naturally in dart frogs in the wild, and can also be manufactured in a lab, which European scientists suspect was the case with the substance used on Navalny. It works on the body in a similar way to nerve agents, causing shortness of breath, convulsions, seizures, a slowed heart rate and ultimately death.
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The U.K. has accused Russia of repeatedly flouting international bans on chemical and biological weapons. It accuses the Kremlin of carrying out a 2018 attack in the English city of Salisbury that targeted a former Russian intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, with the nerve agent Novichok. Skripal and his daughter became seriously ill, and a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after she came across a discarded bottle with traces of the nerve agent.
A British inquiry concluded that the attack "must have been authorized at the highest level, by President Putin."
The Kremlin has denied involvement. Russia also denied poisoning Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian agent turned Kremlin critic who died in London in 2006 after ingesting the radioactive isotope polonium-210. A British inquiry concluded that two Russian agents killed Litvinenko, and Putin had "probably approved" the operation.