© REUTERS/ Henry Nicholls
"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.
As I said yesterday, it was foolish to try to turn a police investigation into a political matter. This instantly causes doubt in the mind of every policeman minded person, as we saw with 9/11. This is called 'distracting the discourse' in Masonic circles, and many UK policemen are familiar with that tactical term. It is foolish because the tactic will not work in the fullness of time in both the British and Russian political cultures. Even haste is a clue to the policeman minded person in our culture.