UPDATE: ALEXEI NAVALNY’S WIDOW SAYS TESTS CONFIRM HE WAS POISONED IN PRISON. (PHOTO).

 Alexei Navalny’s widow says tests confirm he was poisoned in prison

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison in February 2024, was poisoned, his widow Yulia Navalnaya said Wednesday.

Navalnaya shared images of his prison cell showing vomit on the floor on the day he died, along with video clips from a court appearance days earlier in which he appeared healthy. At the end of a 15-minute video, she revealed that her team had obtained smuggled biological samples from Navalny’s body, and two independent laboratories in separate countries had confirmed he had been poisoned. She did not specify the type of poison or the countries of the labs.

“Labs in at least two countries examined these samples independently of each other. And these laboratories, in two different countries, reached the same conclusion: Alexei was killed — more specifically, he was poisoned,” Navalnaya said.

Navalny had been imprisoned in 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been treated following a poisoning with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok, which he and his wife blamed on President Vladimir Putin. Russian authorities said he died of natural causes while held in a penal colony near Salekhard, above the Arctic Circle.

Navalnaya called her husband “a symbol of hope for our country” and accused Putin of destroying that hope. In January 2025, Navalny’s lawyers were sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison on “extremism” charges.