Yulia Navalnaya Says Alexei Navalny Was Poisoned

Yulia Navalnaya, widow of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, has claimed that international laboratory tests on samples taken from her husband confirm he was poisoned, Reuters reports.

Navalny, who was 47, died on February 16, 2024 in a prison in the Arctic Circle, a loss that stripped Russia’s opposition of its most prominent and influential figure. Navalnaya has repeatedly accused the Russian authorities of being behind his death, while the Kremlin has dismissed such accusations as unfounded.

In a video message shared on X, Navalnaya said that biological material had been smuggled out of Russia last year and analysed by two laboratories abroad.

We managed to transfer Alexei’s biological materials abroad. Laboratories in two different countries conducted examinations. These laboratories, independently of each other, concluded that Alexei was poisoned. These results are of public importance and must be published. We all… pic.twitter.com/Sp8w1322gY
— Yulia Navalnaya (@yulia_navalnaya) September 17, 2025

«These labs in two different countries reached the same conclusion: Alexei was killed. More specifically, he was poisoned,» she said, urging the laboratories to publish their findings about what she described as the «inconvenient truth».

She did not disclose which substance had been identified but stressed that the results contradicted the version provided by Russian investigators, who previously claimed that Navalny died from «a combination of diseases».

Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies have assessed that President Vladimir Putin did not directly order Navalny’s killing, according to reports by the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal.