While British Prime Minister Theresa May expelled 23 Russian diplomats on March 14 over the chemical weapon attack on Russian former spy and his daughter in the United Kingdom, Russia claims the nerve agent could have been stored in any post-Soviet country, including Ukraine.
Moscow rejected British deadline for Russia to explain a nerve-agent attack on the former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia on March 4 when they were found unconscious on a public bench in the medieval English city of Salisbury.
The biggest expulsion of Russian diplomats from the U.K. in more than 30 years followed Russia’s former director of Federal Security Service Nikolay Kovalev’s statement a day earlier. On March 13, he told Russian news agency RIA Novosti that since “such substances were stockpiled in former Soviet Union republics – sorry, but Ukrainian involvement can’t be ruled out.”
British officials initially said the Skripals had been exposed to a rare nerve agent of undetermined origin, while May later identified the nerve agent used in the attack as Novichok – Russian for “newcomer.” It refers to a group of nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union – namely in the town of Shikhany in Saratov Oblast and Volgograd – in the 1970s and 1980s, to elude international restrictions on chemical weapons.
Even though Russia claimed it had renounced the use and production of chemical weapons, some Russian scientists blew the whistle on Novichok’s existence back in 1992 and claimed at the time that the nerve agent was designed specifically to skirt chemical weapons conventions.
A 2008 report of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said that back in 1992, Syria‘s Sema Ltd. Corporation obtained a 45-ton shipment of trimethyl phosphite, a nerve-gas precursor, reportedly from Russia. Shipments of other precursors from Russia were detected in 1993. Later the FSB reported that in 1993 a group of people, including Lt-Gen Anatoliy Kuntsevich – an adviser on chemical and biological disarmament to then-president Boris Yeltsin – and some employees of the State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology, shipped 800 kg of a component that with the help of a certain technology “could be used in the production of poisonous substances.”
In October 1995, Russia announced the investigation of Kuntsevich for allowing illegal exports. He was also sanctioned by the US State Department.
In 2016, international non-governmental intelligence community InformNapalm said it has caught trail of a secret cargo, which arrived from Syria in the occupied Crimea in high secrecy: the cargo ship Nadalina under the flag of Sierra Leone, heading from Tartous, Syria via the Romanian seaport of Navodari entered the port city of Feodosia in the Russian-occupied Crimea in October.
The unloading of cargo, which contained a number of khaki-painted containers, by the Russian military using a port crane started overnight October 22, 2016 amid tightened security measures. The analysis of the unloaded containers “gives reason to suggest that they contain ammunition with at least 200 mm caliber. Despite the absence of direct evidence, the analysis of indirect features gives grounds to assume that the contents of the shipment are ammunition/components of weapons of mass destruction – most likely, chemical weapons,” reads the report.
Now it’s up to the British experts to decide whether Russia violated the 1993 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction.
In 2017, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons announced the destruction of Russia’s final batch of declared chemical weapons.
While the investigation on the poisoning is ongoing, British Foreign Office said on March 14, that the use of a nerve agent in Salisbury follows a well-established pattern of Russian state aggression, including the death of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, cyber attacks on a number of European ministries and interference into Montenegro and the US elections.
The U.K.’s allies also stepped up their condemnation of Russia.
U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and a chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on March 13 that “whether in the shadow of the Kremlin or in a peaceful town in the English countryside, Vladimir Putin will not hesitate to engage in state-sponsored assassination and endanger the lives of innocent bystanders. He must not be allowed to treat the United Kingdom or any other nation as a venue for political murder.”
