It's funny how the political foes of some prominent politicians and dictators seem to keep waking up dead. In one of the more high profile cases, out of Russia, we saw Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died about two years ago, and they now believe his death ties back to a toxic frog.
It is “highly likely” that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed by a rare toxin found in poison dart frogs, five European nations said in a statement Saturday, adding that Russia had the “means, motive and opportunity” to administer the deadly dose when Navalny died in an Arctic prison two years ago.
The statement, by the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, the Netherlands and Germany, provided official Western government validation of the belief — widely held by Navalny’s family and thousands of his supporters — that he was murdered by Russian authorities, perhaps on a direct order from the Kremlin.
It's important to note that the poison dart frogs in question are not native to Russia.
The statement said that the five nations, all NATO allies, were “confident that Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a lethal toxin” following analysis of samples from him that confirmed the presence of epibatidine, a substance found in poison dart frogs in South America.
The substance is not found naturally in Russia despite Moscow’s claims that Navalny died of “natural causes,” the statement said. “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,” the allies said.
Time, motive, opportunity, all add up to this being a suspicious death indeed.
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This isn't the first such mysterious death of a Putin foe. Those deaths include:
- Sergei Yushenkov, April 2003: Yushenkov was a Putin foe shot outside his own Moscow home.
- Anna Politkovskaya, October, 2006: Politkovskaya was a journalist known for frequent criticism of Putin's regime, shot to death in her Moscow apartment.
- Alexander Litvinenko, November 2006, poisoned in London with polonium-210.
- Boris Nemtsov, February 2015, a Russian opposition leader shot near the Kremlin.
There are many more.
This always seems to be the way with totalitarian leaders; their foes die under suspicious circumstances. T'was ever thus, probably at least since the caveman Groog, campaigning for tribal leader, was found standing over the body of his rival Korag, holding a bloodied rock, proclaiming "Groog know nothing, rock must have fallen from cave ceiling." The thing about Russia, through history and even now, is that they aren't exactly subtle about it.
Just after World War 2, when the horrors of life inside the Soviet Union were becoming known in the West, cartoonist Bill Mauldin drew a scene wherein an old man with a long white beard is sitting on his bunk in a prison cell, in his nightshirt, having just been awoken by two guards. One of the guards is holding a noose and reassuring the old man: "Don't worry, Excellency. Comrade Popov and I have committed hundreds of successful suicides."
If you think there aren't those in the American left today who would pull off similar mysterious deaths, you're kidding yourself. And if anyone sees any correlations in an infamous American political family, the same family that gave rise to the term "Arkancide," that's perfectly understandable.
[Editor's Note: this article was edited for clarity after publication.]
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