Five European governments accused Russia of violating international weapons prohibitions after concluding that opposition figure Alexei Navalny was killed by poisoning, moving the case from a human rights dispute into the enforcement framework of global arms control treaties.
The United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands said on Saturday that laboratory analyses detected the toxin epibatidine in samples taken from Navalny, rejecting Moscow’s assertion he died of natural causes. The governments notified the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that they consider the case a breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention and, by implication, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.
