Alexei Navalny's widow says lab tests confirm he was poisoned

Jessica Schladebeck, New York Daily News on Sep 17, 2025

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The widow of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said Wednesday that tests conducted by two foreign laboratories confirm he was poisoned prior to his death in prison last year.

Navalny, once considered one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest rivals, fell unconscious and died in Feb. 2024 after a walk at an Arctic penal colony, where he’d been serving a 30-year sentence. He was 47 years old at the time.

Officials provided few other details on the matter, sparking concern worldwide that his death was politically motivated.

In a video shared online, Yulia Navalnaya said she sought out additional tests in a bid to prove her late husband was murdered. She added that his biological materials were “smuggled abroad,” but she did not specify where, nor did she provide further details.

“These labs in two different countries reached the same conclusion: Alexei was killed. More specifically, he was poisoned,” Navalnaya say in the clip.

“I demand that the laboratories that conducted the analyses publish their results” she added, before accusing them of “pandering to Putin on account of so-called higher considerations.”

Navalny was arrested back in January 2021 upon returning from a hospital in Germany, where he’d been recuperating from what his team called an assassination attempt carried out by the Kremlin. They claimed he fell ill during an August 2020 flight from Tomsk, Russia, to Moscow, with several labs around the world later confirming nerve-agent poisoning to be the cause. At that time, he was ordered to spend more than two years in prison for violating probation.

Then, in March 2022, Navalny was sentenced to nine years at a high-security facility on fraud and contempt charges that his team has called politically motivated. A year later, he was handed an additional 19 years on charges of extremism relating to his anti-corruption foundation.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied any involvement in his death.