Navalny’s killing was a theatrical homicide to sow worry within the West… because of this Europe has chosen to disclose it: BOB SEELY

His frame was thin and his eyes hollow, but in the last images of Alexei Navalny, appearing in court via video link from his Arctic penal colony, the Russian opposition leader was in good spirits, even joking with the judge that he needed more money.

Barely a day later, in February 2024, he died on the floor of his prison cell, vomiting as he did so.

We now know what many suspected from the start: this was no ‘natural’ death as the Russian authorities reported. 

It was murder – and a particularly bizarre and grotesque one, featuring an extraordinarily powerful neurotoxin derived from South American poison dart frogs.

This was an assassination exotic even by the lurid standards of Vladimir Putin.

We know this because material from Navalny’s body was covertly obtained by his family and allies, smuggled out of Russia and analysed in separate laboratories in different countries.

Both identified the neurotoxin epibatidine, which does not occur naturally in Russia, and causes respiratory failure in tiny doses.

The use of dart frog poison raises two chilling questions. First: why use such an exotic method of murder? Second: why allow it to be discovered at all?

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death while in detention was announced on February 16, 2024

Prior to his death, Vladimir Putin had already ordered Navalny’s assassination once before, in August 2020

Putin had already ordered Navalny’s assassination once before, in August 2020. 

A team from Russia’s secret service, the FSB, poisoned him with Novichok – the same chemical agent used against Sergei Skripal in Britain. 

Navalny survived only because his plane made an emergency landing and Russian doctors, unaware that he had been poisoned deliberately, treated him.

Yet Putin let Navalny and his family leave for Germany to recover, perhaps hoping that he would stay there.

Perhaps hoping, too, that the publicity the poisoning would generate in the West would sow the seeds of paranoia in those of his enemies living there.

Navalny bravely returned to Russia in January 2021 and was duly sentenced to decades in prison in a series of show trials that echoed those of the 1930s.

If the Kremlin wished to kill Navalny while imprisoned, it had easier options. 

He could have been beaten to death by ‘overzealous’ guards. He could have been slowly starved. He could have been left to deteriorate physically until his body failed. 

Such an outcome would have amounted to a grim, slow death. Instead, Putin – and the order for Navalny’s death would only have come from Putin – had his nemesis murdered in a uniquely theatrical and gruesome way.

This was pure, sadistic pleasure from the Russian dictator. Navalny was not merely another critic, a lawyer turned investigator whose reports into corruption cut close to Putin’s inner circle.

Navalny represented another path for Russia, broadly pro-Western and law-governed, so different from the corrupt fusion of secret police, organised crime and crony power that defines the country.

Navalny bravely returned to Russia in January 2021 and was duly sentenced to decades in prison in a series of show trials that echoed those of the 1930s. (Pictured during his imprisonment)

Putin’s murder of Navalny was a final show of disrespect, hatred and contempt, killing not only a man but also an alternative future for Russia. 

Like Ivan the Terrible or Vlad the Impaler, he wants the deaths of his enemies to be special. It says much about the Russian leader’s state of mind. 

But there must have been a risk that the means of death would leak? Perhaps, as with Navalny’s earlier escape to Germany, Putin was relaxed – or even wanted it.

If so, the message is blunt: if Russia cannot be loved, it will be feared. 

Putin’s outlook is summed up in a Russian proverb: ‘Beat your own, so that others fear you.’

However, the announcement from Britain and European countries also sends a message.

First, the findings were revealed at the Munich Security Conference – a location heavy with symbolism.

It was here, in 2007, that Putin declared that the post-Cold War order was over and signalled Russia’s confrontational path.

To Putin, Europe is saying: we see you, we understand your chemical weapons, and we see what you represent.

We know you are breaking the Chemical Weapons Convention by developing these toxins.

To sceptics within the US, whose commitment to European security cannot be taken for granted, it reminds Donald Trump of the pernicious nature of Putin’s regime; a threat to individuals as well as to nations.

• Dr Bob Seely MBE is the author of The New Total War