Putin arch-rival Alexei Navalny died after being poisoned with a lethal toxin and Russia is to blame for the attack, the UK and its allies have said.
The UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands said on Saturday during a press conference at the Munich security conference that analysis of samples from Navalny “have conclusively confirmed the presence of epibatidine.”
It is a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America.
Yulia Navalnaya, his widow, appeared at a press conference at the event to announce the discovery.
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The countries said that “only the Russian state had the combined means, motive and disregard for international law” to carry out the attack on the Russian opposition leader.
The allies also pointed to an attempt to poison Mr Navalny with the nerve agent Novichok in 2020, which followed the Salisbury poisonings in 2018.
They will now send their findings to the UN’s chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
Navalny, who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests, died in a penal colony in Siberia in February 2024.
He was serving a 19-year sentence that he believed to be politically motivated.
Ms Navalnaya said last year that two independent labs had found that her husband was poisoned shortly before his death. She has repeatedly blamed Putin for Navalny’s death, something Russian officials have vehemently denied.
It is not clear how the frog poison was allegedly administered to Navalny.
This story is being updated
