Novichok
[19] Novichok was also involved in the poisoning of a British couple in Amesbury, Wiltshire, four months later, believed to have been caused by residual nerve agent discarded after the Salisbury attack.
[22] In September 2020, the German government said that opposition figure and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who was evacuated from Omsk to Berlin for treatment in late August after becoming ill during his flight, was poisoned by a Novichok agent.
[24][26] A small amount of agent A-230 was also claimed to have been synthesised in the Czech Republic in 2017 for the purpose of obtaining analytical data to help defend against these novel toxic compounds.
[27] The Soviet Union and Russia reportedly developed extremely potent fourth-generation chemical weapons from the 1970s until the early 1990s, according to a publication by two chemists, Lev Fyodorov and Vil Mirzayanov, in Moskovskiye Novosti weekly in 1992.
He was the head of a counter-intelligence department and performed measurements outside the chemical weapons facilities to make sure that foreign spies could not detect any traces of production.
According to expert witness testimonies that three scientists prepared for the KGB, Novichok and other related chemical agents had indeed been produced and therefore Mirzayanov's disclosure represented high treason.
"[9] According to Yevgenia Albats, "the real state secret revealed by Fyodorov and Mirzayanov was that generals had lied—and were still lying—to both the international community and their fellow citizens.
"[9] Mirzayanov now lives in the U.S.[33] Further disclosures followed when Vladimir Uglev, one of Russia's leading binary weapons scientists, revealed the existence of A-232/Novichok-5 in an interview with the magazine Novoye Vremya in early 1994.
[34] In his 1998 interview with David E. Hoffman for The Washington Post the chemist claimed that he helped invent the A-232 agent, that it was more frostproof, and confirmed that a binary version has been developed from it.
[35] Uglev revealed more details in 2018, following the poisoning of the Skripals, stating that "several hundred" compounds were synthesised during the Foliant research but only four agents were weaponised (presumably the Novichok-5, −7, −8 and −9 mentioned by other sources): the first three were liquids and only the last, which was not developed until 1980, could be made into a powder.
[46][47] Since its independence in 1991, Uzbekistan has been working with the government of the United States to dismantle and decontaminate the sites where the Novichok agents and other chemical weapons were tested and developed.
[44][49] Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a British chemical weapons expert and former commanding officer of the UK's Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiation and Nuclear Regiment and its NATO equivalent, "dismissed" suggestions that Novichok agents could be found in other places in the former Soviet Union such as Uzbekistan and has asserted that Novichok agents were produced only at Shikhany in Saratov Oblast, Russia.
[8] Following the poisoning of the Skripals, former head of the GosNIIOKhT security department Nikolay Volodin confirmed in an interview to Novaya Gazeta that there have been tests at Nukus, and said that dogs were used.
The agents are reportedly capable of being delivered as a liquid, aerosol or gas via a variety of systems, including artillery shells, bombs, missiles and spraying devices.
[3] Mirzyanov makes clear that a large number of compounds were made, and many of the less potent derivatives were reported in the open literature as new organophosphate insecticides,[67] so that the secret chemical weapons program could be disguised as legitimate pesticide research.
According to chemical weapons expert Jonathan Tucker, the first binary formulation developed under the Foliant programme was used to make Substance 33 (VR), very similar to the more widely known VX, differing only in the alkyl substituents on its nitrogen and oxygen atoms.
Zoran Radić, a chemist at the University of California, San Diego, performed an in silico docking study with Mirzayanov's version of the A-232 structure against the active site of the acetylcholinesterase enzyme.
[77] As can be seen with other organophosphate poisonings, Novichok agents may cause lasting nerve damage, resulting in permanent disablement of victims, according to Russian scientists.
[78] Their effect on humans was demonstrated by the accidental exposure of Andrei Zheleznyakov, one of the scientists involved in their development, to the residue of an unspecified Novichok agent while working in a Moscow laboratory in May 1987.
The agent caused permanent harm, with effects that included "chronic weakness in his arms, a toxic hepatitis that gave rise to cirrhosis of the liver, epilepsy, spells of severe depression, and an inability to read or concentrate that left him totally disabled and unable to work."
Russian opposition–linked historians Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky speculated that the murder became "one of the first in the series of poisonings organised by Russia's security services".
[86] According to The Independent, "A closed trial found that his business partner had obtained the substance via intermediaries from an employee of the State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology (ГосНИИОХТ / GosNIIOKhT),[87] which was involved in the development of Novichok agents.
[2] Leonid Rink, an employee of GosNIIOKhT, received a one-year suspended sentence for selling Novichok agents to unnamed buyers "of Chechen ethnicity" soon after the poisoning of Kivelidi and Izmailova.
"[90] On 13 March the BBC asked Vladimir Putin if Russia was "behind the poisoning of" Skripal and he answered "Get to the bottom of it first then we can discuss it" while he delegated a spokesperson to claim that "a circus show in the British parliament" was the upshot.
Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, refused to shake hands with Russian ambassador Alexander Yakovenko as he expressed "outrage" over the attack.
[93] Daniel Gerstein, a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said it was possible that Novichok nerve agents had been used before in Britain to assassinate Kremlin targets, but had not been detected: "It's entirely likely that we have seen someone expire from this and not realised it.
[98] In February 2019, the Bellingcat website published precise allegations that identified GRU Major Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev as a man who travelled in March 2018 to London under the false identity of Sergei Fedotov.
It is claimed with detailed photograph evidence, and phone, travel, passport, and motoring database records that GRU Colonels Alexander Mishkin and Anatoly Chepiga assumed the identities of Petrov and Boshirov,[99] and placed the poison on Skripal's doorknob.
[100] On 30 June 2018, Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess were found unconscious at a house in Amesbury, Wiltshire, about eight miles from the Salisbury poisoning site.
The takeover attempt was ultimately linked to the influential Bulgarian politician and oligarch Delyan Peevski who has historically been funded by Russia's state-owned VTB Bank.
