Navalny’s widow says tests show he was poisoned in Arctic prison

Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, said laboratories in two countries had concluded he was killed by poisoning while serving a prison sentence in an Arctic penal colony, and challenged those labs to publish their findings.

Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner who became the Kremlin’s most prominent domestic critic, died suddenly in prison on 16 February 2024 at the age of 47. In a video posted on social media this week, Navalnaya said her husband’s team had "obtain[ed] and securely transfer[red]" biological samples out of Russia after his death and that independent analysis in two foreign laboratories showed he had been "murdered." She did not name the laboratories, describe the samples, or say what poison, if any, was detected, and she implied the labs were reluctant to release results for political reasons.

"They don't want an inconvenient truth to surface at the wrong time," Navalnaya said, urging the laboratories to make their results public. She added she expected official resistance to her efforts to pursue the matter, quoting official views that as a wife she lacked legal standing to receive documents. "But I have grounds. Not legal, but moral grounds," she said.

Navalny’s death came after a long-running confrontation with the Russian state. He survived an attempted poisoning with a Novichok nerve agent in 2020, returned to Russia from Germany despite that attack, and was arrested on arrival. He had spent roughly three years in prison under convictions widely described by supporters and by Western governments as politically motivated. In the weeks before his death he was moved to a penal colony inside the Arctic Circle.

In the video, Navalnaya recounted what she said were testimonies from penal-colony employees about his final hours. According to those accounts, Navalny was taken outside for a walk but became ill, returned to his cell, lay on the floor, pulled his knees up, began moaning and vomiting, then suffered convulsions while guards watched through the cell window. She said an ambulance was not summoned until some 40 minutes after he became ill and that he died shortly thereafter. The BBC has not been able to verify the prison staff accounts cited by Navalnaya.

Russian authorities have offered different explanations. Prison officials told Navalny’s mother that he had experienced "sudden death syndrome," and state investigators later said his death had been caused by a medical condition and arrhythmia. Navalnaya has rejected those conclusions and has repeatedly pointed the finger at the Russian leadership.

"I affirm that Vladimir Putin is guilty of killing my husband, Alexei Navalny," she said in the video, calling her husband a "symbol of hope for a better future" for Russia. Navalnaya’s statement recalled a pattern of suspicions among Navalny’s supporters and Western governments that the state had been involved in earlier efforts to silence him, including the 2020 Novichok attack.

The Kremlin has so far given little public response to Navalnaya’s latest assertions. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he was unaware of her statements. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who rarely mentioned Navalny by name while the opposition leader was alive, spoke briefly about his passing in March 2024, calling the death "always a sad event" and saying he had accepted a proposed prisoner swap on the condition that Navalny not return to Russia. "But such is life. There's nothing to be done about it," Putin said at the time.

Navalny’s death removed from the Russian political landscape the most visible figure who had repeatedly challenged the Kremlin, and his passing has reverberated through a civil-society sector already deeply curtailed by a years-long crackdown. Since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, authorities have introduced punitive laws that have led to mass arrests, prosecution of activists and the forced dispersal or shuttering of many opposition groups. Many of Navalny’s associates have been jailed or fled abroad.

Navalnaya herself lives abroad with their two children and faces the prospect of arrest if she returns to Russia. Despite official warnings and the risk of reprisals, thousands of mourners turned out for Navalny’s funeral in Moscow in March 2024. Navalny’s supporters have also circulated previously unseen images on social media purporting to show the cell where he died and the small exercise yard assigned to him.

Independent verification of the laboratory findings Navalnaya described would require the publication of methods and results by the named laboratories; Navalnaya urged them to make those details public. The lack of named institutions, the absence of publicly available analysis and competing official explanations mean international scrutiny and demands for clarity are likely to continue.

Given the Kremlin’s longstanding sensitivity to allegations that state actors have targeted opponents, and its limited public comment to date, further official disclosure from Moscow appears unlikely. Navalny’s death and his widow’s allegations add a new chapter to a case that has already shaped Western perceptions of Russia’s treatment of dissent and has further narrowed domestic political space in the country.