Putin’s Latest Hitman: Poison Dart Frog Contracts State-Sponsored Murder

KEY POINTS

•European allies concluded Alexei Navalny was killed by epibatidine, a highly toxic dart frog poison, in 2024.
•Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed the findings during a Slovakia visit, with the Kremlin denying the report.
•The toxin’s presence violates multiple international chemical weapons treaties, marking a second poisoning after a 2020 Novichok attack.

In a plot twist straight out of a spy movie or a really twisted David Attenborough special, European allies announced that Alexei Navalny, Putin’s famously unlucky political foe, was killed with epibatidine — a rare toxin sourced from Ecuadorian poison dart frogs. Yes, the Kremlin’s weirdest fruit basket includes frogs that deliver a poison 100 to 200 times deadlier than morphine. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking from Slovakia on February 15, 2026, sided with U.K., France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, while Russia called the report a 'Western propaganda hoax,' channeling peak denial. The toxin, not found naturally in Russia and deadly enough to suffocate victims, was allegedly smuggled and planted in Navalny's Siberian penal colony prison body in 2024. This case marks at least the second time Navalny was poisoned — the first involving the famous nerve agent Novichok after a 2020 Berlin coma. Turns out, Russia's chemistry homework is done by breaking treaties left and right while dabbling in amphibian bioweapons. Alastair Hay of Leeds University summed it up: administering frog toxin violates chemical weapons laws Russia signed on like a phone contract it never planned to honor.