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The UK has formally notified the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) about the Russian state’s use of a banned toxin against opposition leader Alexei Navalny, confirming information previously published by The Insider that a rare poison, epibatidine, was found in samples taken from the political prisoner’s body.
The statement was made against the backdrop of the Munich Security Conference. It was on the morning of the event’s opening session two years ago that Russia’s prison service first published its announcement that Navalny had died in a Siberian penal colony. The substance itself can be found in nature only in the skin of poison dart frogs from South America. The UK’s Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, said “only the Russian government had the means, motive, and opportunity to deploy the lethal toxin against Alexei Navalny during his imprisonment in Russia.”
London views Navalny’s poisoning as a “blatant breach” of the Chemical Weapons Convention and is calling on Moscow to “immediately cease this dangerous activity.” According to the statement: “It is clear Russia did not destroy all its chemical weapons as claimed in 2017, and that it has not renounced biological weapons, as it is obliged to under the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.”
The UK said it worked on the investigation jointly with its partners from Sweden, France, the Netherlands, and Germany and that it intends to seek means of holding Russia accountable.
In 2017, the OPCW officially confirmed that Russia had completed the destruction of its declared chemical weapons stockpiles. After that, Moscow said it had fully met its obligations under the convention. However, after cases involving the use of banned substances (such as the nerve agent Novichok), a number of Western countries questioned whether all of Russia’s stockpiles or related programs had been eliminated.