How Putin creates poisons that make victims foam at mouth, vomit, and convulse ...Middle East

Russia officially ended its chemical weapons programme in 2017 and destroyed its inventory. But few believe it has really ended.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a chemical weapons expert and adviser, said this claim “was a complete lie”.

Recent revelations that Alexei Navalny, a vocal Kremlin critic, was killed with a lethal dart frog poison have drawn fresh attention to institutes previously linked to Russia’s biological weapons.

The toxin, epibatidine, kills its victims by overstimulating receptors in the nervous system, causing muscle twitching, paralysis, seizures, slow heart rate and respiratory failure, resulting in death by suffocation.

Another side effect is vomiting, which Navalny appeared to suffer from. Pictures of his cell shared on social media appear to show a pool of vomit on the floor.

John Foreman, a former British defence attaché to both Moscow and Kyiv, said: “His last moments must have been excruciating and his fate sends a message to anyone brave enough to not cross the system.”

The UK and other countries said that “only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin” against the opposition leader, who died in an Arctic prison camp.

“We’ve always suspected that they have an extant chemical warfare programme, and this is yet another realisation that it is, because extracting this biological toxin from the Ecuadorian mountain frog is not a insignificant process,” de Bretton-Gordon told The i Paper.

He added: “You need a pretty sophisticated laboratory with experts to do it, and with Novichok as well, you need a very sophisticated programme designed so that we in Nato couldn’t identify it or track it down.”

Extreme toxicology

Russia’s State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology (GosNIIOHT), which is thought to have worked on creating the frog toxin, was sanctioned by the EU and UK back in October 2020, but there is a wider web of institutions that have been linked to Russia’s chemical weapons programme.

Mark Galeotti, an historian and lecturer specialising in Russian crime and security affairs, and a columnist for The i Paper, said these institutions “are all parts of an integrated programme. They all have their own particular specialisms and role within the overall process, and to a degree, they are all competitors”.

He added: “Just as there are competing bureaus developing tanks, or fighter planes or attack helicopters, likewise these institutions are both collaborating, but also competing for resources and for prestige.”

One individual considered central to Russia’s chemical weapons efforts is Sergey Chepur, the chairman of the St Petersburg State Institute for Experimental Military Medicine of the Ministry of Defence (GNII VM), a body that de Bretton-Gordon described as “heavily involved” in the programme.

Chepur is understood to be an expert in extreme toxicology, listed as an author on academic research papers published by the Russian Military Medical Academy and scientific journals.

According to the opensanctions website, he has been the head of GNII VM since September 2015, shortly after the institute was given autonomy by the Russian Ministry of Defence.

GNII VM is a military research unit located outside St. Petersburg. In May 2015, the institute was given the role of organising “scientific research in the interest of Russia’s defence and national security” and “conducting tests of the developed products”.

Galeotti said that just as Britain has Porton Down, a chemical weapons and disease laboratory, “there are legitimate grounds for Russia to have biological programmes. But at the same time, this being the regime that it is, it clearly goes beyond just simply defensive”.

While GNII VM has an official interest in developing antidotes for nerve agents as it is part of Russia’s military medical programme, data obtained by investigative outlet Bellingcat in 2020 showed that key researchers were integrated with Russia’s military intelligence, including its black ops unit.

Bellingcat concluded that Chepur was likely the middleman between Russia’s military intelligence and chemical research institutions. The investigation found his phone number in the records of one of the main suspects in the 2018 Salisbury poisoning, Alexander Mishkin.

The attack left Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in a critical condition and killed local woman Dawn Sturgess months later after she came into contact with a discarded perfume bottle containing the Novichok nerve agent.

Vil Mirzayanov, a former chemist and head of the Soviet-era technical counterintelligence department, told The Atlantic in March 2018, that after exposure to Novichok: “Your eyes grow narrow, you lose vision. Next is vomiting, breathing problems, and incessant convulsions.”

In police interviews read out at the Salisbury enquiry, Sturgess’s boyfriend Charlie Rowley described how she began foaming at the mouth and convulsing less than 15 minutes after spraying the nerve agent on her wrists.

According to an academic paper published in 2019, the Novichok used in the Skripal case was likely created at the GosNIIOHT lab between 1971 and 1993.

The Bellingcat investigation found that between November 2017 and March 2018, Chepur communicated with Major General Denis Sergeev, who has been accused of not only coordinating the Salisbury poisoning but of playing a part in the 2015 poisoning of Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev.

Sergeev, under the alias Sergei Fedotov, and two other Russian agents, were charged in absentia in Bulgaria with attempted murder after three individuals, including Gebrev, were allegedly poisoned with a substance similar to Novichok.

Sophisticated labs

Founded in the early Soviet period to develop Russia’s chemical weapons, GosNIIOHT was tasked with supervising the destruction of the country’s 40,000-tonne stockpile of nerve agents after 1994.

Independent investigative outlet The Insider reported that employees at GosNIIOHT published a paper in 2013 describing a method for producing epibatidine.

De Bretton-Gordon said that the biological samples from Navalny would be admissible evidence, which “will now be given to the international criminal court”.

“In theory, the OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) should go to Russia and investigate, but of course, the Russians won’t allow that,” he added.

OPCW did not respond to requests for comment.

Scientific Center “Signal” is another institution that, according to de Bretton Gordon, is “central” to Russia’s chemical weapons programme. Its official function is to ensure technical and scientific control over the exports of Russian materials.

Created in 2010, SC Signal reportedly specialises in the technique of nano-encapsulation, coating bioactive compounds in a protective shell. One of the effects that can be achieved by this process is masking agents with other, decoy substances.

In an earlier poisoning of Navalny in August 2020, which he survived, less dangerous poisons were found, suggesting that nano-encapsulation had been used.

Russia has denied any involvement

Russia has hit back at accusations that it was involved in the death of Navalny, who was found dead in his cell in a remote Arctic penal colony in February 2024 while serving a 19-year prison sentence. Russia has claimed Navalny died of natural causes.

After the accusations from the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands earlier this month, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said: “When the test results are available and the formulas for the substances are disclosed, we will comment accordingly.”

“All such assertions are merely propaganda aimed at diverting attention from pressing Western issues,” she added.

But reports suggest that the war in Ukraine has prompted a surge in Russia’s interest in biological weapons, including its use of banned non-lethal chemicals such as chloropicrin on Ukrainian troops, violating the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.

In October 2024, The Washington Post reported that an old Soviet-era biological weapons laboratory near Moscow was being renovated. Analysing satellite imagery, it found that 10 additional buildings were being constructed, several bearing the hallmarks of biological labs designed to handle extremely dangerous pathogens.

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Russian officials have publicly confirmed that the site, called the 48th Central Scientific Research Institute (TsNII), will be used to study deadly microbes such as the Ebola virus, in order to strengthen Russia’s defences against bioterrorism and future pandemics.

But experts have said that it is impossible to tell from satellite photos whether the laboratory will be used to develop vaccines for deadly viruses, or to weaponise them.

Foreman said that Russia has “poured money into the 48th TsNII over recent years”, initially under the guidance of General Kirillov, head of the Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear Defence Troops, who was assassinated by Ukrainians in Moscow in 2024.

He described Russia’s chemical weapons manufacturing as “a notoriously secretive and opaque area with much expertise inherited from the USSR and further active development.”

For those in the West, this is starting to become very clear.

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