When leading Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny died two years ago, the only real question was not whodunnit, but howdunnit? 

His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, quickly blamed poison and said that his partisans had taken tissue samples from his corpse for examination. Yesterday, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands announced that a combined intelligence operation had demonstrated that he was killed with epibatidine, a nerve toxin only found on the skin of Ecuadorian dart frogs.

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The announcement was followed by the inevitable stream of (not always unjustified) scepticism, trollish derision, and official denial. To be sure, making the announcement at the Munish Security Conference does highlight the degree to which this was being done as a political gesture, an attempt to shore up an anti-Putin alliance that has recently shown a degree of weariness and disharmony. The fact that the Americans were not also on the platform along with five of the more hawkish European nations can also be considered a sign of the times.

For all that, there is no specific reason to doubt the claim. The truth is that the only real question had always been whether he had been........

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