By Guy Faulconbridge
LONDON (Reuters) – Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, said two foreign laboratories had carried out tests on biological samples obtained from her husband that showed he was poisoned.
Navalny died suddenly at the age of 47 on February 16, 2024, in a Russian prison in the Arctic Circle, depriving the Russian opposition of its most popular leader.
Navalnaya has repeatedly accused Russia of killing him, an allegation the Kremlin dismisses as nonsense. President Vladimir Putin has said that before Navalny died there had been plans to swap Navalny in a prisoner exchange with the West.
LABS IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES CONCLUDED NAVALNY WAS KILLED
Navalnaya posted a video on X in which she said that biological material from Navalny was smuggled abroad in 2024 and that two laboratories examined the material.
“These labs in two different countries reached the same conclusion: Alexei was killed. More specifically, he was poisoned,” Navalnaya said.
She demanded that the laboratories release their findings about what she called the “inconvenient truth”. She did not specify what poison the laboratories had found.
“These results are of public importance and must be published. We all deserve to know the truth,” Navalnaya said.
When asked about Navalnaya’s remarks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “I don’t know anything about these statements of hers, and I can’t say anything.”
The Kremlin casts Navalny’s political allies as dangerous extremists out to destabilise Russia on behalf of the West. It says Putin enjoys overwhelming support among ordinary Russians.
Navalny described Putin’s Russia as a brittle criminal state run by thieves, sycophants and spies who care only about money. He had long forecast Russia could face seismic political turmoil, including revolution.
In one of his last essays, Navalny in 2023 admonished the Russian elite for its venality, expressing hatred for those who squandered a historic opportunity to reform the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
DEATH IN THE ARCTIC
Navalny earned admiration around the world for voluntarily returning to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he underwent treatment for what Western laboratory tests showed was an attempt to poison him with a nerve agent in Siberia.
He was arrested on arrival and was serving sentences on fraud, extremism and other charges that he said were trumped up to silence him.
Last year, Navalnaya dismissed information from Russian investigators that Navalny had died from “a combination of diseases”. U.S. intelligence agencies have determined that Putin did not order Navalny killed, according to the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal.
In her video, Navalnaya described her husband’s last moments. He felt ill in a small exercise cell and was crouched on the ground in pain, she said. But he was then put in a punishment cell.
“Alexei lay on the floor and pulled his knees up to his stomach and moaned in pain,” she said. “He said his chest and stomach were burning. Then he began to vomit.”
She showed a picture of what she said was the cell. It showed a pile of vomit on the floor.
Navalnaya said that the truth about her husband’s death was inconvenient for some unidentified politicians in the West, but gave no specifics.
(Reporting by Reuters, Editing by Guy Faulconbridge, Ros Russell and Timothy Heritage)
