Well-wishers leave flowers on the grave of late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny on the second anniversary of his death, 16 February 2026. Photo: EPA / Maxim Shipenkov
Russia’s exiled Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) on Monday published excerpts from an official forensic examination of its founder Alexey Navalny’s body carried out by the Russian authorities in response to rumours that the contents of the report would be leaked by what it described as “sensationalist” media outlets this week.
The report details the results of forensic testing and an extensive autopsy conducted at the Russian Ministry of Health’s Centre for Forensic Medical Expertise (CFME) in the summer of 2024, several months after Navalny’s sudden death in an Arctic penal colony. Its findings had previously not been publicly available.
In a post on X, AFC chair and head of its investigative department Maria Pevchikh said that the report in question had been available both to the ACF and Western scientists for over a year and a half, but had not been released because its contents did “not meet even the most basic ethical standards”.
Stressing that laboratories in five European countries had already proven that Navalny was murdered using epibatidine, a powerful toxin derived from a South American tree frog, Pevchikh warned that the “sanitised” findings from the CFME examination would “add nothing significant” to what was already known about Navalny’s death.
According to the 289-page document, Russian examiners concluded that Navalny died from what they termed a “combined disease”. The report further alleges that Navalny suffered from dangerously high blood pressure that had already caused damage to his blood vessels and organs, as well as widespread scarring of the heart muscle. These conditions were linked to several complications, including brain swelling, arrhythmia, and fluid in the lungs.
Pevchikh charged that the forensic medical examination showed “signs of obvious ‘tailoring’ to fit the desired result: that Navalny died of natural causes”.
"According to the experts we spoke to, the list [of tests performed] is unusually broad and uncharacteristic of what the Kremlin calls ‘death from natural causes’,” Pevchikh added, pointing to the fact that examiners “looked for poisonous substances, including toxins from plants and mushrooms”.
The only unusual substance identified by Russian examiners in Navalny’s body was atropine, an antidote for certain types of poisoning, while the specific toxin which European labs later identified as Navalny’s cause of death, is not mentioned in the report at all.
