WARSAW: The wife of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said on Wednesday that laboratory analysis of smuggled biological samples found he was killed by poisoning while incarcerated at an Arctic prison in February 2024.

Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s foremost critic for years, died in mysterious circumstances while serving a 19-year prison sentence on a string of charges widely seen as retribution for his opposition.

The charismatic anti- corruption campaigner had rallied hundreds of thousands across Russia in anti-Kremlin protests as he exposed the alleged ill-gotten gains of Putin’s inner circle.

His allies have always maintained he was murdered in prison, and Moscow has never fully explained the causes of his death, saying only that he fell ill while walking in the prison yard on February 16, 2024.

In fresh allegations, his wife Yulia Navalnaya said that before her husband was buried in Moscow, his allies “were able to obtain and securely transfer biological samples of Alexei abroad”.

“Laboratories in two countries came to the conclusion that Alexei was killed. Specifically: poisoned,” she said in a video posted on social media.

She did not divulge details of what samples were obtained nor the results of the analysis, but she urged the labs to independently release their results and to specify which poison they believe was used.

Navalnaya also published unverified photos she said were of his prison cell after his body was removed, showing a pool of vomit on the floor, and claimed that testimony from prison officials said he had been convulsing.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that he was unaware of claims made by Navalnaya that her husband had been poisoned in a prison.

Navalny’s ally Maria Pevchikh, who also shared the pictures, said the unverified accounts from prison officials showed the opposition leader “had been lying here on the floor, vomiting, screaming in pain”.

“The prison guards, ins­tead of saving him, left him here, locked the bars and the door,” she said on X.

In her video, Navalnaya acknowledged there were “inconsistencies” in the accounts they had obtained from five prison officials.

Published in Dawn, September 18th, 2025