OPCW claims several countries including US possess smuggled 'Novichok' nerve agent

RT
Sat, 17 Mar 2018 10:29 UTC

© REUTERS/ Henry Nicholls

The 'Novichok' nerve agent allegedly used in the Sergei Skripal attack likely came from a country were Russian chemists were taken after the Soviet Union collapsed to continue their research, Russia's OPCW envoy told RT.

"As for 'Novichok,' there was never a scientific program under such a codename in the Russian Federation," Alexander Shulgin, Russia's permanent representative at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said. "However, in Soviet times, research began to produce a new generation of poisonous substances. Such research was carried out not only in the USSR, but also in the US."

As the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, foreign "special services took a group of scientists... with the research that existed since the Soviet times" out of the country so that they could go on with their studies of poisonous substances, he said.

"We know the exact countries where such work continued, achieving certain success," Shulgin said, without naming any. "The positive results of those studies can now be found in open sources."

"Therefore, we can assume that the source of the substance used [against Skripal] in Salisbury is concealed in one of the countries where this research continued and achieved certain success," the Russian envoy said.

Russian chemist Vil Mirzayanov, whose claims of Russian complicity have now been widely circulated in Western media, was among those scientists who left Russia and continued their work abroad, Shulgin said. Mirzayanov, who currently lives in the US, was the first to disclose the existence of the 'Novichok' nerve agent to the public in a 1992 article. When the Skripal crisis erupted, he said on Facebook that the 'Novichok' formula had only been published in his book 'State Secrets: An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program,' and alleged that only Russia could've used such a nerve agent to attack Skripal.

'UK is afraid we'll find a catch in their case'

Shulgin also said that there's currently no dialogue between the Russian and the UK delegations on the Skripal issue at the OPCW headquarters in The Hague. "We've made them an offer to start bilateral consultations, but they refuse; also declining to provide any samples to us."

"Judging by the statement of the head of the British delegation, they view our offer on bilateral consultations as a distraction... as if by proposing those consultations Russia wants to drag out this whole thing and avoid responsibility," the envoy said.

"My guess is that our British partners are afraid that, should our experts examine those samples, they will discover some catch in this whole case. And our British partners have absolutely no interest in that."

"Moreover, we warned them that we're ready for a meaningful dialogue, but only if the British side backs its accusations against us with convincing proof. In case nothing is presented to us... we'll proceed from the fact that Britain has nothing and in this case it would have to be held accountable for slander," he said.

Comment: The UK's patently ridiculous narrative is already falling apart faster than a neocon can hysterically scream "chemical weapons!" See also: MPs retweet claim that Porton Down scientists can't identify nerve agent as evidence of being Russian

Lavrov's assessment of the UK media is on point:

The foreign minister criticized coverage of the incident on Friday, saying Western media were failing to honestly report on the complexity of the situation. "I watched CNN and the BBC today. Their coverage of the story is very simplistic. They said Britain won support and solidarity from France, Germany and the United States, they all demanded an explanation about why Russia poisoned that colonel. And Russia denies poisoning him. That's all," he said.

However, the nuances of the story have been omitted, Lavrov added. Those include the fact that investigation of the incident is still underway, and that Britain has failed to adhere to the rules of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on how such cases should be handled. The fact that Russia was stonewalled by London when it requested evidence to support the accusations has also been ignored.

"The media professionals from the BBC and other outlets do not tell all those things to their Western audiences. They oversimplify things and make suggestive faces," the Russian minister said. "They put things into the people's heads. I guess those are the methods favored by Western propaganda. I hope we will never sink to such methods."