[1]
By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
In a media blitz this week, Yulia Navalnaya (lead image) has issued a video call on journalists to investigate her fresh allegations that Alexei Navalny was poisoned to death in his Russian prison on February 16, 2024. The anti-Russian media in the NATO capitals have rallied to report the claims [3]. So far, however, none of the evidence Navalanya claims to be holding, and which she cites in her appeal, has been presented for independent viewing, authentication, or forensic expertise.
Navalnaya’s 15-minute video can be viewed with English subtitles here [4]. A detailed report in Russian and English has appeared in Meduza [4], the oppositionist publication in Latvia which is currently appealing for crowd funding to replace the cutoff of US government money.
[5]Source: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/09/17/vladimir-putin-is-responsible-for-the-murder-of-my-husband [4]
According [4] to Navalnaya, “all the forensic evidence is there” — Min 12:11. None of the evidence she presents meets the forensic standard of any police, prosecutor, coroner, or criminal court in the NATO alliance.
Visible on the desk in front of Navalnaya is the first of the two new sources of evidence she is claiming [4] to report – this is being presented as “testimony from five employees of the Kharp prison describing what happened to the opposition leader in the final days of his life”. There is no date, title, or other means of verifying the source of this “testimony” or of the partially blurred excerpts shown on the film clip which Navalnaya quotes in closeup. Newspaper reporting in London cites an earlier Navalny organization report that “medical records that appeared to have been altered to support the state’s claim that he died of cardiac problems…A second version of the report, which appeared to have been edited, omitted those symptoms [6].”
It is unclear why Navalanya now appeals for investigative journalists to substantiate her claims but then fails to disclose the document sitting on her desk or reveal its source; report how the Navalny organization obtained it; and describe how she and her associates have investigated what she acknowledges to be the problem of courtroom admissibility for the purported testimony. “You know how police lie,” Navalnaya says when quoting them. “Even those testimonies contradict each other in places.”
Navalnaya claims there is a second source of evidence for her allegations.
[7]Source: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/09/17/vladimir-putin-is-responsible-for-the-murder-of-my-husband [4]
Her new claim [4] is that “biological samples” were obtained from Navalny shortly after his death and then transferred for testing by “laboratories in at least two countries independently” — Min 11:53. Nineteen months after Navalny’s death is a very 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. That’s the protection prosecutors, juries, and judges require against tampering, forgery, and faking [8].
Navalnaya is not only failing to provide as much. She isn’t saying how many western country laboratories have been engaged in the testing; what laboratories have been engaged; what the biological samples were; and why the lab reports Navalnaya is citing now aren’t also on her desk for viewing.
If, as is likely, the biological samples were hair cut from Navalny’s head before his burial, highly specialized testing of biochemical traces preserved in hair was first conducted of Navalny in Berlin, four days after he was first admitted for the alleged Novichok poisoning of August 2020. That evidence did not prove the Novichok allegation at all; the Berlin tests showed self-poisoning by Navalny with lithium and benzodiazepines [9]. For details, read the new book [10].
Until and unless Navalnaya releases the evidence for her new poisoning allegation, there is nothing new, nothing credible for journalists to report.