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By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
The Ecuadorian Poison Dart frog, Epipedobates anthonyi, doesn’t produce the deadly epibatidine poison out of personal spite. Indigestion, more like.
According to British toxicologists, epibatidine is refined by the frog’s innards from precursor chemicals, also toxins, which come from the flies, ants, beetles, and other bugs which live in the same environment and are within range of the frog’s tongue. Captive frogs in a chemical warfare laboratory in the US, UK, Germany, France or Sweden would be unable to produce epibatidine unless the toxic insects the frogs eat are also captive. “Technically, a captive frog would need to be given the same variety of food that it eats in the wild,” a forensic toxicologist in England explains. “These ants, bugs, etc. in the wild contain the toxins and chemicals which in turn the frog eats and then produces its own poison. So a lab would have a supply of these bugs that are present in the frog’s natural environment in order for the captive frog to produce the poison. You would need to airmail live ants from Brazil to the lab. Not impossible, but if a toxicologist is going to detect the poison post-mortem anyway, why bother with such an effort.”
The British discoverers of the frog in the 1970s reported the great difficulty they had in isolating the toxicated from the untoxicated frogs in the Ecuadorian jungles. By the 1990s, however, this problem had been solved by scientists all over the civilized chemical warfare world. On payment from the military research budgets of their governments, they then synthesized epibatidine [3], so that the supply could be assured without the bugs and frogs on hand. In the Wikipedia summary of the science, “more than fifty ways to synthesize it in the laboratory have been devised.”
The Americans [4] came first in synthesizing and stocking epibatidine, then the British [5]. More Americans followed in 1993 [6]. The Chinese succeeded in their synthesis methodology at a university in Virginia, also in 1993 [7]. The Russians were twenty years late. The first openly reported synthesis of the poison by Russian researchers was announced in 2013 [8].
In a British government press release, issued last week on February 14, it was claimed [9] that “based on analyses of samples from Alexei Navalny. These analyses have conclusively confirmed the presence of epibatidine…Epibatidine is a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America. It is not found naturally in Russia.”
The allegation by five governments – the UK, Sweden, France, Germany and The Netherlands – is that “given the toxicity of epibatidine and reported symptoms, poisoning was highly likely the cause of his death. Navalny died while held in prison, meaning Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison to him.” Referring to the Novichok allegations in Germany when Navalny was in hospital in Berlin and in the UK following the Skripal and Sturgess cases, the press release adds: “only the Russian state had the combined means, motive and disregard for international law to carry out the attacks.”
This is false.
The state chemical warfare establishments of the US and UK had not only synthesized epibatidine more than a decade before the Russians, but they had accumulated substantial stocks for battlefield antidote testing, as well as for commercial production of painkillers.
Like the role of Porton Down (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, DSTL, see lead image) in producing and stocking Novichok in the UK before the alleged Russian attacks of 2018, and the German, French and Swedish laboratory roles in analyzing the Navalny samples in 2020, the means, motive and opportunity for falsifying the Russian poison story have been openly documented for years.
Yulia Navalnaya’s presentations of the poisoning allegation confirm that she and the government agencies behind her have been preparing it for more than six months at laboratories they refuse to identify, and with evidence of tissue samples which, after two years, are forensically worthless. That means there is no proof that Navalny’s samples are genuine – that they have not been tampered with.
“Conclusive” may well be the evidence of epibatadine in the Navalny tissue samples, but it is “highly likely” — the evidence standard identified in the press release — that the poison evidence has been added after Navalny’s death. Speaking scientifically, tracing epibatadine from the Ecuadorian frog is herpetology; the same process in the current information war and in vulpine zoology has been recognized by forensic scientists as “the fox smells his own hole first.”
For the forensics of the Novichok cases in the UK and Germany, here are the only three books available; the third remains in German only.
[10]Left: https://www.amazon.com/Skripal-Prison-John-Helmer/dp/B084PY9W4R/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.usvvY3BWQ_hO5E98yciBWQ.p03NX7CR0vDCKA-qw25_Xyc3w0IMavDblOz7lM3YcME&dib_tag=se&keywords=john+helmer%2C+Skripal+in+prison&qid=1771457294&s=books&sr=1-1 [11]
Centre: https://www.amazon.com/Long-Live-Novichok-British-poison/dp/B0DT1B52RM/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.VVnEWN6MnSFoXHaIerza7g.pQBcppMg6CWaJdoOhqMVgTdekCn7MtthFPmn0oUiBmw&qid=1736820334&sr=8-1 [12]
Right: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Nawalny-Nowitschok-Komplex-Chronik-einer-Inszenierung/dp/398586067X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.NpNJCBWVNG7TOBsTG2F07yTE-HWbyksisFaD1Q8fYH0ylK9K4BV6csfVdVb348X-HYeItANuuvf099pTKuZjJKclgJ7fTt1ZDHBLuIgM3rGecifCnHdFKhQkoX6GdZPzm3Hz06X8m8MJhNjL2hmmKnYPYAQyBtlIabcPtrIiHIH18QleZG7G1mFdkvr1Zy9IWOlJEk0DWA76iTXEDrkkbIveZOfoYFp1mjN9w1vMUdI.fPUoY8C6fJQoD1M3NeAcmO3Bu25k0A4UZFezPMKoSRI&qid=1755762132&sr=1-1 [13]
In September 2025, Yulia Navalnaya called a press conference to announce that post-mortem samples of Navalny tissues had been taken in February 2024, and then sent abroad for testing. Nineteen months later, she claimed [14] that “laboratories in at least two countries independently” — — Minute 11:53 – had “concluded” that the cause of Navalny’s death was poison.
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[17]Source: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/09/17/vladimir-putin-is-responsible-for-the-murder-of-my-husband [14]
Nineteen months after Navalny’s death is an unusually long time for forensic evidence of this type to materialise without the chain of custody required in Anglo-American courts to be admitted in evidence. Navalnaya declared: “I demand that the laboratories that conducted the analyses publish their results”.
Another five months have elapsed, and there is no disclosure either by Navalnaya or her supporting governments of the names of the laboratories or of their result reports. Litigation is now under way in Stockholm to compel the Swedish government to make the disclosures Navalnaya requested.
In her September 2025 [14] statement she also requested the press to investigate. “I call on journalists: demand answers with me”. This call was largely ignored by the media at the time.
The new allegations have been given more media prominence because of the five-government announcement, and because of the media sensation of the Ecuadorian Poison Dart frog. However, the forensic evidence is still missing.
Listen to the Gorilla Radio discussion [18] with Chris Cook, broadcast on Wednesday afternoon in western Canada — starting at Min 30.
[19]Source: https://gradio.substack.com/p/gorilla-radio-with-chris-cook-randy [18]
For more than twenty years Chris Cook has been producing Gorilla Radio [20] from Victoria, British Columbia. For the archive, plus introductions to Canada’s Resistance and the history as it took shape and fought the battles that had to be fought, click here [21].