It was developed in the Soviet Union under the FOLIANT program and is one of the group of compounds referred to as Novichok agents that were revealed by Vil Mirzayanov.

[2][3][4][5] In March 2018, the Russian ambassador to the UK, Alexander Yakovenko, claimed to have been informed by British authorities that A-234 had been identified as the agent used in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

[6] Vladimir Uglev, one of the inventors of the Novichok series of compounds, said he was "99 percent sure that it was A-234" in relation to the 2018 Amesbury poisonings, noting its unusually high persistence in the environment.

An alternative structure for A-234 and the related Novichok agents had previously been proposed by Western chemical weapons experts such as Steven Hoenig and D. Hank Ellison.

[14][15][16] These structures were supported by Soviet literature of the time and were tested as acetylcholinesterase inhibitors,[17][18][19] however Mirzayanov explained that a number of weaker agents developed as part of the Foliant program were published in the open literature as organophosphate pesticides, in order to disguise the secret nerve agent program as legitimate pesticide research.