The choice of “exotic” poison used to kill Alexei Navalny suggests the Kremlin wanted the toxin to be discovered, to send a warning to Vladimir Putin’s other opponents, chemical weapons experts believe.
Using a substance that would survive long enough for samples to be smuggled out of Russia and tested – and could only have originated from a top-level lab – signals that Moscow did not genuinely want to cover up his death, researchers said.
The UK Government and four allies have revealed that epibatidine, produced by poison dart frogs in South America, was found in specimens taken from the Russian opposition leader’s body.
The Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, told the Munich Security Conference that “only the Russian government had the means, motive and opportunity” to use the poison while Navalny was in being held in an Arctic prison camp.
Navalny’s former chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, has long been convinced that he was murdered in February 2024. The politician’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, said in September last year that lab tests had shown he was poisoned and called for the details to be released.
The Kremlin has always denied any involvement in Navalny’s death, claiming that he died of natural causes, and has rejected the new findings.
Dan Kaszeta, a former White House adviser on preparing for chemical attacks, who has served in the US Secret Service, told The i Paper: “It’s absolutely no secret that Russian scientists were working on this toxin in the past.”
Epibatidine has been researched legitimately as a potential non-opiate painkiller, which provided Moscow’s scientists with “an easy fig leaf of deniability” while examining its possible use as a poison, he said.
However, he suspects that Russian agents chose to use it on Navalny because they expected – and wanted – their actions to eventually be discovered.
The toxin epibatidine is uniquely produced by poison dart frogs in South America (Photo: Getty/iStockphoto)‘Deliberate message’ to world
Kaszeta pointed out that a 2013 Russian study into the toxin’s medical capabilities was published by researchers working at GosNIIOKhT, the chemical weapons institute that developed Novichok and was implicated in the attempted assassination of former spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018.
Epibatidine is also a drug that remains in the body for a long time after exposure, increasing the chances of samples being transported successfully to facilities in the West, he said.
The combination of these factors therefore indicates that its choice was a “deliberate message” to the world, Kaszeta believes.
A senior chemical weapons expert at a high-level European lab, who wished to speak anonymously, said there would have been much simpler ways of killing Navalny if agents really wanted it to seem like an accident.
He also believes that Russian security services would have been capable of preventing samples reaching the West, which makes him think that they intentionally allowed this to happen.
Supporters of Alexei Navalny have been visiting his grave in Moscow this week (Photo: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty)Professor Alastair Hay, who has spent his career to securing international bans on chemical weapons, also doubts that Russian scientists working on epibatidine ever seriously aimed to produce a safe medical drug.
The “exotic” substance is simply too dangerous, he explained. “Doctors wouldn’t take the risk of trying to treat the patient but inadvertently killing them.”
The toxicologist, based at the University of Leeds, suspects that Russian scientists developed the chemical recipe for the poison some time ago and held it “in their archives”. But Hay is unsure whether they would have “made a new batch” to use against Navalny or relied on existing stocks.
Either way, he said, only high-level security agents would have had access to it. “You would keep it under lock and key, very safe, because it’s potent in such small quantities.” There is no known antidote, he added.
Chemical weapons experts Dan Kaszeta, right, and Professor Alastair Hay think the Kremlin was sending a deadly message to the world (Photos: Hurst Publishers/OPCW)‘Acting on instructions from on high’
The statement by the UK, Germany, France, Sweden and the Netherlands did not address how Navalny could have been exposed to the toxin.
But Hay said: “Apparently, Navalny complained of very severe cramping pain in his stomach, collapsed and vomited, then not long after developed convulsions. That suggests that the route of administration was probably an ingestion.”
US intelligence reportedly concluded a couple of months after Navalny’s death that Vladimir Putin had not directly ordered his murder.
Given the new findings, Hay thinks that whoever administered the poison must have been “acting on instructions from on high, because no one lower down would feel they had the authority” to use such a weapon and kill someone of Navalny’s profile.
“Your standard prison guard wouldn’t dare do something that would harm him because of the repercussions and the thought of making Putin angry.”
Alexei Navalny, seen here during his jail sentencing in 2022, had previously survived a suspected Novichok poisoning in 2020 (Photo: Getty)Kaszeta, author of the book Toxic: A History of Nerve Agents, from Nazi Germany to Putin’s Russia, suspects that the Russian President has personally “authorised these kinds of killings”.
However, Putin has probably “delegated the specifics to trusted underlings”, who would decide how individual operations should be carried out.
A Russian scientist who played a leading role in developing Novichok nerve agents during the 80s recently told The i Paper that he feared Russia is “still developing” deadly poisons.
Vil Mirzayanov, who defected to the US in the 90s after revealing Moscow’s secret Novichok programme, said in December that he believed “they used [a] new poison agent to kill Navalny”.
Visiting Navalny’s grave in Moscow on Monday to mark the second anniversary of his death, his mother Lyudmila Navalnaya said: “We knew that our son did not simply die in prison, he was murdered.”
In response to Cooper, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “Of course, we do not accept such accusations. We disagree with them, we consider them biased and unfounded. And, in fact, we resolutely reject them.”
The Russian embassy in London dismissed the Western investigation as “not a quest for justice but a mockery of the dead”.
It added: “There is no reason whatsoever to credit such ‘findings’ by Western ‘experts’. As with the Skripal case, there are strident accusations, media hysteria, zero evidence, and a host of questions the accusers would rather ignore.”
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