Navalny’s killing was a theatrical murder to sow fear in the West… this is why Europe has chosen to reveal it: BOB SEELY

His frame was thin and his eyes were hollow, but in the latest photos of Alexei Navalny appearing in court via video link from the Arctic penal colony, the Russian opposition leader was in good spirits, even joking with the judge about needing more money.

He died just one day later, in February 2024, after vomiting on the floor of his prison cell.

We now know what many suspected from the beginning: this was not a ‘natural’ death as Russian authorities reported.

This was murder, and a particularly strange and strange one involving an extraordinarily potent neurotoxin derived from South American poison dart frogs.

This was an exotic assassination, even by Vladimir Putin’s gruesome standards.

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

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

The use of dart frog venom raises two chilling questions. First: why use such an exotic method of murder? Second: why let it be discovered?

Before his death, Vladimir Putin ordered the killing of Navalny in August 2020.

Putin had previously ordered the assassination of Navalny in August 2020.

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

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

But Putin allowed Navalny and his family to go to Germany, perhaps hoping that he would stay there.

Perhaps he hoped that the fame the poisoning would create in the West would sow the paranoia 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 reminiscent of those in the 1930s.

If the Kremlin wanted to kill Navalny while he was in prison, they had easier options.

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

Such an outcome could mean a cruel and slow death. Instead, Putin’s arch-nemesis (and Navalny’s death order could only have come from Putin) was killed in a uniquely theatrical and gruesome manner.

This was the pure and sadistic pleasure of the Russian dictator. Navalny wasn’t just a critic, a lawyer turned investigator whose reports on corruption deeply concerned Putin’s inner circle.

Navalny represented another path for Russia, broadly pro-Western and governed by law, a far cry from the corrupt combination of secret police, organized 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 reminiscent of those in the 1930s. (A photo taken while in prison)

Putin’s killing of Navalny was the latest show of disrespect, hatred and contempt; He killed 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 a lot about the Russian leader’s mood.

But there must be a risk of the instruments of death leaking, right? Perhaps, as in Navalny’s earlier escape to Germany, Putin was relieved, even wanted to.

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

Putin’s perspective is summed up in a Russian proverb: ‘Beat yourself so others will fear you.’

However, the announcement from the UK and European countries also gives a message.

First, the findings emerged at the Munich Security Conference, a place steeped in symbolism.

It was here in 2007 that Putin declared the end of the post-Cold War order and pointed Russia’s path towards conflict.

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

We know that you violated the Chemical Weapons Convention by developing these toxins.

To skeptics within the United States, whose commitment to Europe’s security cannot be taken for granted, this reminds Donald Trump of the pernicious nature of Putin’s regime; It is a threat to nations as well as individuals.

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