Chemical security

Soviet toxin research was smuggled out and continued in other countries, including US – OPCW envoy

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.