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It was a very particular choice of weapon, but experts say it remains unclear whether the dart frog toxin used to kill the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was intended to convey a message.
Known as epibatidine, the poison is produced by wild dart frogs native to parts of South America – meaning Navalny could not have accidentally taken the poison.
“Only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin to target Navalny during his imprisonment in a Russian penal colony in Siberia, and we hold it responsible for his death,” the UK government has stated.
Epibatidine was certainly an efficient choice: it is a powerful painkiller thought to be hundreds of times more potent than morphine and can cause muscle paralysis.
“Your chest wall doesn’t expand and contract, so essentially you can’t breathe and you’re [suffocated],” said Alastair Hay, emeritus professor of environmental toxicology, University of Leeds.
And there is another chilling twist. “There isn’t an antidote to this [poison] that I know of,” said Hay.
But while the epibatidine might seem exotic and even ostentatious, it is not as obscure as it might first seem. As Hay notes, the chemical has long been studied as a painkiller for lung conditions ranging from pulmonary fibrosis to sarcoidosis, but its high toxicity precludes its therapeutic use.
As a result researchers in countries including Russia have been making chemicals with a similar structure, apparently in the hope of harnessing epibatidine’s analgesic properties without its toxicity.
“Because its structure is known, it can be synthesised in the lab,” said Hay. “It’s a more complicated chemical structure, but competent chemists are not going to have a problem making it.” In fact epibatidine and its analogues can even be bought online for research purposes.
Russia certainly has form for poisoning those who pose a threat. Among other cases, in 2006 the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko died after radioactive polonium-210 was slipped into his green tea, while in 2018 the former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia survived being poisoned by the nerve agent novichok – the substance later killed 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess.
Indeed Russia is known to have a poison factory in Moscow and, as Hay points out, “very, very competent chemists”.
The foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, has suggested the use of epibatidine in the killing of Navalny conveyed a message. “Russia saw Navalny as a threat. By using this form of poison the Russian state demonstrated the despicable tools it has at its disposal and the overwhelming fear it has of political opposition,” she said.
But while the poison might appear to be a macabre calling-card from the state, signalling an ability to dispose of its enemies in a nasty and painful way, some say the situation is rather murky.
“I think it would be very difficult to detect it, and that would probably be one of the reasons why it was used,” said Hay, adding the potency of the poison meant only a small quantity would be present in the body, making the chances of finding it remote.
That the toxin has been identified is, Hay suggests, down to state of the art instruments. It also – crucially – required samples from Navalny’s body. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, has previously stated such samples were smuggled out of Russia.
But Dr Brett Edwards, an expert in biological and chemical weapons at the University of Bath, said that if the goal is to avoid detection, or create a more deniable situation, there are many other poisons – or other methods – that could have been used.
That, he said, means it was a deliberate choice to deploy the unusual toxin – as was the case for the novichok poisonings.
“[Navalny] was in a high-security prison. So, first of all, nothing gets in there unless they wanted [it] to get in there, particularly for a political prisoner, for obvious reasons,” he said. “If they wanted to do it quietly, they wouldn’t have used a toxin,” he added.
Edwards noted the Russian state did delay the release of Navalny’s body – possibly to make it harder for others to acquire and analyse samples. But, he added, the use of poisons has a long tradition as a tool of Russian statecraft – potentially explaining why it was the chosen method for killing Navalny.
To Dr Luca Trenta, an associate professor of international relations at Swansea University, the case did not appear to involve overt signalling, unlike the attack on Litvinienko or the Skripals, where the message was one of reach and capability.
“It was not like with the Skripals or with Litvinenko in which it was clearly impossible to hide,” he said. “This one, if it had not been for a fairly long effort at getting some samples and some testing out, it might not have been discovered.”
Instead Trenta said Russia might have been testing the use of epibatidine, showcasing such capabilities if the exotic toxin was discovered, or simply using a particularly hideous weapon in revenge.
“If there is a signal to be sent here [it] is Russia’s ability to use these weapons, to produce these weapons. And in a sense, its disregard for international norms and international law,” he said. “But again, it’s a tricky case when it comes to signalling, because if it was a signalling matter perhaps it would have been more overt.”
Edwards noted that while the use of epibatidine raised the question of what other capabilities the Russia might have, the bottom line remained the same.
“It’s intriguing, but in essence, it’s just murder. It’s just standard political murder. They’ve always done it. They’ll keep doing it,” he said.
