In February this year at the Munich security conference, the United Kingdom, together with our European partners Sweden, Germany, France and the Netherlands, confirmed that prominent Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a lethal toxin, Epibatidine, while being held in the custody of the Russian state in a Siberian penal colony. He did not survive. Epibatidine is a poison derived from the skin of a toxic dart frog found in the Amazon rainforest, far away from Russia, and only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this.
This is only the latest incident. Russia’s willingness to develop and deploy highly toxic chemicals forms a clear and disturbing pattern. Alexei Navalny survived an earlier poisoning from a Novichok nerve agent in 2020 which he attributed to the Kremlin. In 2018, a Novichok was used in Salisbury in an attempt to assassinate the Skripals which tragically resulted in the death of a British national, Dawn Sturgess.
Following the confirmation that Alexei Navalny was poisoned with Epibatidine, the Foreign Secretary said we would
“make use of all policy levers at our disposal to continue to hold Russia to account.”
Today I am updating the House on a new package of sanctions under the UK’s chemical weapons regime, targeting two leading scientific and military Russian institutions and key individuals involved in the research, development and production of the lethal toxin Epibatidine and Novichoks in flagrant violation of Russia’s obligations under the chemical weapons convention and biological and toxin weapons convention.
Our sanctions today send a strong message that the UK will continue to take action by exposing those within Russia’s scientific and military community who are responsible for such egregious actions, deterring others from pursuing similar activity.
This package builds upon prior sanctions for Russia’s use of chemical weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine.
The Russian state has demonstrated time and time again that it is unafraid to use the full range of despicable tools available to it to terrorise people, including its own citizens, and undermine democracy, in brazen defiance of international norms.
It is clear Russia did not destroy all its chemical weapons as claimed in 2017, and that it has not renounced biological weapons, as it is obliged to under the biological and toxin weapons convention. Ahead of tomorrow’s 112th executive council meeting at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons we stand ready with our partners and states parties to impress upon Russia the need to rejoin the consensus of the international community, and to pursue science for peaceful purposes.
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