There is “no innocent explanation” for the presence of the poison in the opposition leader’s body, the countries said on Saturday.
Russia poisoned opposition politician Alexei Navalny with a toxin from a poison dart frog, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom said on Saturday.
The five governments made the announcement at the Munich Security Conference, two years after news broke during the same event of the pro-democracy campaigner’s death in a Russian prison.
Analyses of samples from Navalny’s body “conclusively confirmed” the presence of a toxin called epibatidine, which is found in poison dart frogs in South America and could only have been deployed by Russia, the countries said in a joint statement.
Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, welcomed the conclusion as providing “certainty” about what she had long believed.
Speaking at the POLITICO Pub at the conference, she said she was “satisfied” with the evidence, noting that: “He was killed, he was very young — less than 50. He spent his last years in torturous conditions … [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin killed him.”
She said she had previously been told it would be “impossible” to say definitively how he died, and she was “very thankful to the U.K. and other countries” for helping to prove “that we know now that my husband was killed.”
She predicted that “one day there will be justice for Vladimir Putin.”
The joint statement released earlier Saturday said: “Navalny died while held in prison, meaning Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison to him. There is no innocent explanation for its presence in Navalny’s body.”
Russian authorities said the opposition leader died of natural causes.
But poisoning was “highly likely the cause of his death,” the five countries said in a joint statement on Saturday. Scientists from Porton Down, the U.K.’s top secret laboratory, played a key role in the findings, according to British officials.
Navalny, a longtime thorn in the side of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was filmed the day before his death at a court hearing cracking jokes and seemingly in high spirits
The U.K. said in a separate statement on Saturday that the circumstances of Navalny’s death were “brutal and barbaric.”
The five countries’ representatives to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have written to its director general to inform him of the alleged Russian breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
The U.K. said Navalny’s death is part of an “alarming pattern” of behavior by Russia, including its use of the Novichok chemical agent in the U.K. in 2018, which led to the death of a British woman, and Russian troops’ “frequent use of chemical weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine.”
Russia’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This article has been updated.