April 8, 2018
A key member of the Soviet research team that developed the nerve agent the UK claimed was used to poison the former double agent Sergei Skripal has sided with the British government in its dispute with Moscow. Vladimir Uglev said he was convinced Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia had been attacked in the English city of Salisbury with a compound he had developed in 1975. However, he cautioned it would be impossible to prove beyond doubt where the nerve agent had originated. Mr Uglev worked on the program, code-named Foliant by the Soviets, that led to the development of the Novichok stable of chemical weapons from the 1970s until the 1990s. His comments come as the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is expected to complete its analysis of samples of the substance used in the Salisbury attack this week. Britain’s defense research laboratory at Porton Down has identified one of a group of nerve agents collectively referred to as Novichok — a name one of Mr Uglev’s colleagues coined for the group of substances — as having been used in the poisoning. “I have no doubt that it was precisely A-234 which was used!” Mr Uglev said in comments emailed to the Financial Times from his retirement home on the Black Sea coast. He said judging by comments made by Porton Down scientists and other information he had received, the substance had to be the compound he had first synthesized in December 1975 at the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology, in the southern Russian town of Shikhany.
He was also heavily critical of Vladimir Putin, Russian president, and his administration. “As a Russian citizen, I do not accept the great-power chauvinism fanned by the regime of Kremlin-Lubyanka thieves and killers, and therefore fully understand and support the policy of the British government towards Russia,” Mr Uglev said. “At the same time, as a professional chemist, I perfectly understand that we will not get 100 per cent proof of the guilt of the Kremlin-Lubyanka killers, neither from the English specialists, nor from the experts of the OPCW,” added Mr Uglev. He said he did not expect the OPCW to be able to prove either where the substance had been manufactured or how it had found its way to Salisbury. UK investigators would not be able to rely on methods they used to trace the source of the polonium-210 that was used to murder the former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 because that was a radioactive substance and was relatively easy to detect unlike a nerve agent like A-234, he said. More than 20 EU and NATO members and other European countries have expelled a total of almost 150 Russian diplomats in solidarity with the UK over what they said was the first offensive use of a chemical weapon in Europe since the second world war.