Russia may be developing new nerve agents which could be even more deadly than Novichok and would help avoid detection of their use in any future attacks, experts fear.
Senior defence figures are also concerned that Russia’s alleged illegal use of toxic gas in Ukraine could escalate into full-blown chemical war, using substances that could kill thousands.
Moscow claims it destroyed its last stockpile of chemical weapons in 2017 and has previously denied any suggestion of continued work on them.
Yet a scientist who helped create Novichok nerve agents in the 1980s told The i Paper that he believes Moscow might be creating new poisons.
Dr Vil Mirzayanov, who worked on the covert Soviet programme but later became a whistleblower, suspects Russia is “still developing” nerve agents.
Mirzayanov believes a new variety may have been used to kill the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison last year “because they don’t want any scandals… connected to this violation”.
Dr Vil Mirzayanov, seen here in 2018, has said in an interview with The i Paper that he fears Russia is developing more chemical weapons (Photo: Dominck Reuter/AFP via Getty)Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, claimed in September that two labs had identified a substance used to murder him.
She alleged that details of this have been kept secret by Western governments for political and legal reasons.
The Kremlin says that Navalny died of natural causes, and US intelligence analysts have reportedly concluded that Putin did not order his murder while in jail.
However, Mirzayanov speculated that a carbamate compound could have been used as a poison to kill Navalny.
Soviet and American scientists experimented with carbamates, some of which are used as pesticides, during the Cold War.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, the British Army’s former head of defences against chemical attacks, agrees with Mirzayanov that Moscow is probably still developing toxic substances.
“It seems pretty clear, from the people I talk to and others, that the Russians still have an extant chemical weapons programme,” he said.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon has helped teach Ukrainian soldiers how to protect themselves from chloropicrinProfessor Alastair Hay, a world-renowned expert on chemical weapons, said the use of Novichok in Salisbury “was basically sending a message that: ‘We still retain this ability, we still have cracking chemists who can make these things’.”
He warned that Russian scientists “could conceivably come up with other agents which are even more toxic in smaller amounts”.
The Russian embassy in London did not respond to a request for comment.
‘It could be worse than a tactical nuclear strike’
The Government’s Strategic Defence Review stated this year that Russia’s chemical weapons posed an “enduring threat” to Britain.
Russian agents used a form of Novichok in Salisbury the following year for their attempted assassination of former spy Sergei Skripal, a British independent inquiry concluded this month.
The same class of nerve agents was used again in 2020 for the first of Navalny’s two suspected chemical poisonings, according to the German government.
Police in Salisbury had to wear protective clothing while working on the Skripal case (Photo: Ben Stanstall / AFP via Getty)The Kremlin denies any involvement in the Salisbury poisonings, which it claims were staged by the UK. It dismissed the Navalny poisoning finding as a “falsification”.
But experts believe that Russia might hold secret, banned stockpiles of chemical weapons that Vladimir Putin could use in Ukraine if his regime feels threatened.
Western intelligence agencies have already accused Russia of using thousands of canisters and grenades filled with either CS or chloropicrin, two types of tear gas.
Russian soldiers have admitted using this to “smoke out” Ukrainian troops while they are sheltering. This can make them easier targets for bullets and bombs.
Although police forces can legally use tear gas to restore order during riots, its use in warfare is banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention to prevent escalation.
Stephen Doughty, the UK’s Sanctions Minister, said: “Barbaric chemical weapons are supposed to be consigned to history, and yet Russia continues to deploy them on the battlefield in Ukraine, in a further demonstration of the cruelty at the heart of Putin’s regime.”
Stephen Doughty, left, meeting UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in July (Photo: Lokman Vural Elibol / Anadolu via Getty)De Bretton-Gordon, a retired colonel who commanded specialist UK and Nato units tasked with responding to chemical attacks, worries these actions could be the prelude to much worse.
“The only way the Russians made any advances in the last 18 months in the Donbas is through the massive use of chloropicrin,” he said. “The Russians are using it all the time.”
Russia denies this and argues instead that Ukraine has used tear gas.
But de Bretton-Gordon continued: “What the Ukrainians are really worried about is if the Russians escalate. If they used Novichok instead of chloropicrin, it could be absolutely devastating.”
Just “one drop” of Novichok is enough to kill a person, according to Mirzayanov. But it could be used on a wider level to quickly kill everyone in a trench, or even in a whole town, explained De Bretton-Gordon.
He said this could be “even worse” than using so-called tactical nuclear weapons, which have smaller warheads than strategic nuclear bombs, as they are designed to be used on a battlefield near friendly troops. “It would probably kill more people.”
De Bretton-Gordon underlined that such an attack remains very unlikely, but claimed the risk has increased because Western deterrence has been too weak.
“Putin reckons he could probably get away with a chemical attack because he thinks we won’t react,” he said. “There is nothing off limits for Putin if he thinks it’ll enable him to win.”
He added: “If you have no morals or scruples, you’d use this stuff all the time, because it’s morbidly brilliant… It would almost be illogical for them to not use it, because it could be a battle-winning capability.”
Is Russia developing new nerve agents?
Following the Salisbury attack in 2018, former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said the UK had “evidence that Russia has been investigating delivery of nerve agents and has been creating and stockpiling Novichok”.
Russia denied there was ever any secret Novichok programme.
But after Navalny was poisoned in 2020, an investigation by the research group Bellingcat reported that Russia continued its Novichok development programme “long beyond the officially announced closure date”.
The late Alexei Navalny in hospital after the attempt to murder him in 2020 (Photo: Instagram / Handout / Anadolu via Getty)It alleged that military scientists who developed Novichok had been assigned to work at innocent-looking institutes to continue “clandestine” work on chemical weapons “under cover of civilian research”.
Workers at two of these facilities – the State Institute for Experimental Military Medicine and the Scientific Centre Signal – had led “weaponisation” efforts on Novichok since 2010, Bellingcat claimed.
It found that these two institutes were in “frequent communication” with Gosniiokht, the Moscow-based lab where Vil Mirzayanov and his colleagues developed novichok in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Gosniiokht has been sanctioned by the UK since 2020 in retaliation for the Salisbury poisonings.
Putin may do ‘desperate things’
The UK’s Strategic Defence Review called for investment in “critical” defences against Russia’s chemical weapons, saying a new Defence Research and Evaluation agency should make work on this an “essential and urgent” priority.
One of the review’s authors, General Sir Richard Barrons, told The i Paper that there are many practical reasons against using chemical weapons, because they can threaten the attacker’s own troops and make captured territory unusable.
But Putin has shown he has no fear of breaking international law and may be prepared to take more extreme measures, he cautioned.
“In the West, we can talk ourselves until we’re blue in the face about these types of rules – but Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, they’ll make their own minds up and they feel under no obligation to agree with us,” said Barrons.
“The stakes are so high now in state confrontation they are potentially existential. When you are faced with an existential peril, your risk calculus changes. You’re prepared to do more desperate things.”
Russia’s use of chemical weapons in Ukraine
Russian forces have unleashed “dangerous chemicals” such as chloropicrin – first used as a choking gas in World War One – a total of 6,540 times this year, according to a Ukrainian military report this month.
Ukraine claims that six of its soldiers have been killed by Russian gas attacks. Although exposure to chloropicrin is rarely fatal, Germany’s BND intelligence agency states it “can be lethal in high concentrations in enclosed spaces”.
“It burns so badly. Your eyes water, your face starts to burn,” Ukrainian soldier Oleksandr Nyahu told the US-based news outlet RFE/RL. “You can’t breathe in fully… you inhale and you start gagging and coughing.”
Ukrainian soldiers are equipped with gas masks. Grenades found in Ukraine have been confirmed to contain tear gas, which is prohibited under the Chemical Weapons Convention (Photo: Stringer / Anadolu via Getty)The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has confirmed that grenades found in Ukraine, as well as samples from soil and plants nearby, “contained the riot control agent CS”.
Russia is a member of the OPCW, which has not pinned the blame on either side.
But the UK and its Nato allies have been firm in saying Russia has used tear gas in many K-51 and RG-VO grenades.
Stephen Doughty said the UK “will not stand for such callous disregard of the Chemical Weapons Convention”.
The UK placed sanctions on Russia’s Scientific Research Institute for Applied Chemistry in July for producing RG-VO grenades. Two commanders of Russia’s chemical defence corps were also sanctioned.
However, the institute reportedly makes the grenades using components from two other companies which have not been sanctioned so far.
Russia’s UK embassy has called the sanctions “meaningless” and “futile”, claiming they were an “attempt to deflect attention from the extensively documented instances of toxic agents being used by their terrorist proxies within the Ukrainian armed forces”.
Russia has been using tear gas against Ukrainian trenches, like in this training drill (Photo: Stringer / Anadolu via Getty)Professor Hay, who has investigated several previous alleged uses of chemical weapons, agrees that the West has appeared toothless while Putin is “flagrantly violating the rules” in Ukraine.
Because of this, “you do worry about the pushing of the boundaries,” he said.
“What the OPCW or the Chemical Weapons Convention lack is any way of punishing those who break the rules,” he added. “Punishment is more diplomatic than anything, but it clearly doesn’t hurt Russia very much.”
Hay has spent much of his career campaigning for all chemical weapons to be destroyed. He despairs at their use in Ukraine, as well as by Sudan’s government forces who are accused of using deadly chlorine gas against rebels last year.
“The Chemical Weapons Convention was such a glorious achievement,” he said. “We were hoping that chemical weapons were on the way out, so I do get upset about it.”
The Russian embassy said in a statement this month that “Ukraine is being used by Western states as a weapon against Russia”, adding: “We will, of course, take all necessary measures and employ appropriate means to defend our interests.”
But it added: “Russia has no plans, intentions, or reasons for entering into an armed confrontation with the UK.”
@robhastings.bsky.social
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