According to Rubio, the report on Navalny's poisoning is disturbing.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described as "disturbing" the report by five European countries that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died after ingesting the toxin epibatidine. He said the United States had no reason to question these findings.

In a joint statement, Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands said that analyses of samples from Navalny's body confirmed the presence of epibatidine, a poison found in poisonous frogs in South America that do not occur naturally in Russia.

The Russian government has dismissed the allegations as "Western propaganda." Moscow has long denied responsibility for Navalny's death in a prison colony in the Arctic in February 2024.

When asked why the US did not join the joint statement, Rubio noted that it was an initiative of European countries. He stressed that Washington does not dispute their conclusions, but the report was not the result of a US investigation.

"These countries came to this conclusion. They coordinated it. We chose not to. That doesn't mean we disagree with the outcome. It just wasn't our effort. Sometimes countries go out and do their own thing based on the intelligence they've gathered," Rubio said.

(reuters, max)