Attack on former Russian agent and daughter brings showdown between West and Russia

On March 4, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal were found incapacitated in a Salisbury park in Wiltshire, England. They were rushed to Salisbury District Hospital, where doctors stabilized the two and began to investigate what had rendered them invalid. A week later, the British government provided their verdict: the two were exposed to an obscure nerve agent part of a broader class of agents called Novichok.

Mr. Skripal is a Russian ex-spy who became a double agent for the British foreign intelligence agency MI6 in the 1990s. In 2004, Russian authorities sentenced him to 13 years in a high-security prison. He was released to the British government as part of a spy swap in 2010. Since then, Mr. Skripal and his daughter have become naturalized British citizens and assimilated into civilian life.

The discovery of Novichok agents in the Skripals’ systems alarmed officials in Britain and abroad, because Novichok is known to have been only produced in the Soviet Union from the 1970s to the 1980s. This alone raised the suspicion that the attacker was from Russia and had access to the obscure and highly lethal agent.

Because of these revelations, British Prime Minister Theresa May addressed Parliament on March 12 to directly accuse Russia of carrying out the attack against the Skripals. May declared that “We shall not tolerate such a brazen act to murder innocent civilians on our soil,” warning Russian officials that she will “set out the full range of measures that we will take in response” if Russia does not provide a “credible” response to the attack.

The nature of these sanctions became clear on March 14 when 23 Russian diplomats in London were declared personae non gratae and expelled from the country. Other measures announced by the prime minister included the suspension of top-level communications with Russia and the freezing of certain assets in the UK that were suspected to be connected to the Kremlin or corrupt Russian business leaders with ties to the Kremlin. In addition, the prime minister announced that no British officials or royals will attend the 2018 World Cup in Russia this summer.

Other nations stood by the United Kingdom, compounding the accusations that the Kremlin deliberately ordered the poisoning of one of their ex-spies. On March 14, the office of the US Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders released a statement asserting that “United States stands in solidarity with its closest ally, the United Kingdom [and] shares the United Kingdom’s assessment that Russia is responsible for the reckless nerve agent attack on a British citizen and his daughter.” The European Council came out on March 22 with a statement of their own, which said, “[The Council] agrees with the United Kingdom government’s assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian Federation is responsible and that there is no plausible alternative explanation.”

However, the Kremlin’s response was uniform and outright denial of the accusations. The Russian embassy in London released a statement on March 14 declaring their belief that “it is absolutely unacceptable and unworthy of the British Government to seek to further seriously aggravate relations in pursuit of its unseemly political ends.” On March 17, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced a retaliatory expulsion of 23 British diplomats from the British embassy in Moscow. Their statement read further that due to the “unregulated status of the British Council [a cultural relations center ran by the British government] in the Russian Federation, its activities are terminated.”

The diplomatic spat developed further on March 18, as Russian ambassador to the EU Vladimir Chizhov suggested during a BBC interview that the Novichok agent used against the Skripals may have originated from the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down just northwest of Salisbury. This is the same British government laboratory that had identified the agent the Skripals were exposed to. In response to his interviewer’s invitation for an explanation to the situation, Chizhov pointed to the timing of the British assessment. “Why don’t you ask yourself [this] question: How come the British authorities so quickly managed to designate the nerve agent used as something called ‘Novichok?’ ”

Chizhov continued to argue that Porton Down must have some samples of Novichok agents in order to be able to identify it. When explicitly asked if he believed the agent used in the attack was indeed came from Porton Down, Chizhov raised his hands and said, “I don’t know.” He also suggested that the discontinued nerve agent could have been synthesized by Russian scientists who fled to the West but retained the secret of its creation.

In late March, investigators from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) began sending their own independent investigators to determine the veracity of Porton Down’s own analysis. While the OPCW had ensured the destruction of the remaining declared stockpiles of chemical weapons from Russia in September of 2017, organization officials disclosed that no Novichok agents were ever declared to them by Russia.

On March 19, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson expressed his impatience with Russia’s inconsistent denials to reporters: “Russian denials grow increasingly absurd. At one time they say that they never made Novichok; at another time they say that they did make Novichok but all the stocks have been destroyed.”

His remarks only drew more Russian responses about London’s refusal to cooperate with the Kremlin on the investigation. Vladimir Ermakov, the director of Russia’s Department for Nonproliferation & Arms Control, complained that “The British authorities don’t share any data they received following [their] probe and don’t answer any questions concerning Yulia Skripal.”

Since news of about the Novichok agent has spread, former Russian scientists who had worked on the Novichok project during the 1970s and 1980s under the Soviet Union spoke out about the details of its origins and its use. One of these scientists, Vladimir Uglev, still resides in Russia and participated in an interview with the independent Russian news publication The Bell, in which he detailed his time working on the project. “The agents were designed as alternative to the Soviet analogy of the American nerve agent, VX,” Uglev explained in the interview.

VX was developed in the 1950s by British scientists and was mass-produced by the United States through the 1960s. It is regarded as one of the deadliest nerve agents in the world, comparable to sarin gas. Uglev also warned that no direct antidote was ever developed for the Novichok agents. He continued, “I can say with nearly 100% certainty that if Skripal and his daughter are taken off of life support, they will die, although they are now only technically alive.”

Vil Mirzayanov, another former project member, resides in Princeton, New Jersey and did an interview from his home. He countered some of the claims made by the Kremlin about the Novichok agents. He dismissed their denials, saying that, “The Kremlin [is] all the time, like all criminals, denying – it doesn’t mean anything.” He also assured his interviewers that the Novichok agent used in Salisbury attack could have only originated from Russia. “Novichok was invented and studied and experimented and many tons were produced only in Russia. Nobody knew in this world,” Mirzayanov said. According to him, the likelihood of any assassin unaffiliated with the Kremlin being able to get a hold of such a highly obscure agent was slim.

Novichok (or “newcomer”) is the name assigned by the West to refer to a class of nerve agents produced in the 1970s and 1980s by the Soviet Union. The aim of its development was to create a family of mostly undetectable nerve weapons unfamiliar to NATO soldiers and capable of taking out massive populations with only minimal concentrations of the agents. These agents are also binary, meaning that they can be produced from two harmless and typically legal compounds by simply mixing them together.

The obscurity of the agent has led some to suggest that the agent could have been behind the deaths of other several Russian expats living in the United Kingdom that were ruled as due to natural causes. According to The New York Times, former Homeland Security senior official Daniel M. Gerstein noted that “It’s entirely likely that we have seen someone expire from this and not realized it.” The discovery of its use against the Skripals was possible because in their case the agent had failed to fully take effect.

Suspicions that the Russian government was behind the attack arose even before Theresa May’s address to Parliament. Russia has a history of assassinating and poisoning exiled officials and defectors like Sergei Skripal, and the attack in Salisbury drew parallels to a similar attack on another defector in 2006. In that incident, Alexander V. Litvinenko was found dead after having ingested the radioactive isotope polonium-210 through tea while meeting with Russian intelligence officials in London.

The former intelligence officer’s death and the discovery of the isotope in him sparked a massive investigation that traced the isotope’s unique trail back to Heathrow Airport in London and ultimately to an airport in Russia. Further investigation found that the polonium could have only been sourced from a specific Russian power plant owned by the state. In response, the British government in 2007 expelled four Russian diplomats and imposed several economic sanctions against the nation, which Russia reciprocated with the expulsion of four British diplomats and similar measures.

Sergei and Yulia Skripal remain in critical condition at Salisbury District Hospital, and the prospects of their recovery are unknown. Meanwhile, the diplomatic battle between the West and Russia continues to revive tensions and rebukes the likes of which have not been seen since the Cold War.

Article by MoCo Student staff writer Alex Rankine of Rockville High School