A developer of Soviet-era nerve agents related to the one used against former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia has told the Guardian that a similar poison was used in the murder of a Russian businessman in the 1990s.

The remarks by Vladimir Uglev, a Soviet chemical weapons scientist, contradict official Russian denials that the country had any chemical weapons programme tied to the name novichok, with the formal codename foliant.



‘It’s got me’ – lonely death of Soviet scientist poisoned by novichok Read more

“If you’re asking who made the substances that poisoned the Skripals, his name and his country, it’s possible it was made by my hands,” Uglev wrote to the Guardian. “But we’re unlikely to find out about that, at least according to the information I have at the moment.”



Uglev is one of three Russian scientists to confirm the existence of the top secret chemical weapons programme since the Salisbury attack. His remarks were sent to a handful of journalists on Friday, and he answered follow up questions for the Guardian.

Uglev on Friday said he had been questioned by police immediately after the grisly 1995 murders of banker Ivan Kivelidi and his secretary in an apparent poisoning, and recognised a nerve agent synthesised by his own working group at a closed state laboratory near the Volga river.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin attends the funeral of Ivan Kivelidi in 1995. Photograph: Reuters

“Immediately after Kivelidi’s telephone was analysed, the investigator in my case asked me a number of questions as the substance was synthesised in our group,” Uglev wrote to journalists. He first went public on Wednesday.

Court documents first reported by Reuters and later published by the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta said that a member of Uglev’s lab, Leonid Rink, had been jailed briefly after admitting to selling a small amount of a deadly nerve agent developed under Russia’s so-called foliant programme.

That programme has become famous in the west in recent days as novichok, identified by British authorities as the Soviet-era nerve agent used in Salisbury earlier this month.



The likely sale of the nerve agent to a criminal group in the 1990s will raise questions about Theresa May’s assurances that only a state could have ordered the attack on Skripal.

Quick guide What is novichok? Show Hide Novichok refers to a group of nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s to elude international restrictions on chemical weapons. Like other nerve agents, they are organophosphate compounds, but the chemicals used to make them, and their final structures, are considered classified in the UK, the US and other countries. The most potent of the novichok substances are considered to be more lethal than VX, the most deadly of the familiar nerve agents, which include sarin, tabun and soman. Novichok agents work in a similar way, by massively over-stimulating muscles and glands. Treatment for novichok exposure would be the same as for other nerve agents, namely with atropine, diazepam and potentially drugs called oximes. The chemical structures of novichok agents were made public in 2008 by Vil Mirzayanov, a former Russian scientist living in the US, but the structures have never been publicly confirmed. It is thought they can be made in different forms, including as a dust aerosol. The novichoks are known as binary agents because they only become lethal after mixing two otherwise harmless components. According to Mirzayanov, they are 10 to 100 times more toxic than conventional nerve agents. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images Europe

But nerve agents typically deteriorate quickly. And a binary, which increases shelf life by storing the future nerve agent in two stable precursors, was never achieved at his laboratory, Uglev said.

Nevertheless, he speculated it could remain potent for some time. “If properly stored, I imagine it could poison someone even 50 years later,” he wrote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vladimir Uglev. Photograph: Handout

Uglev worked in the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology in the city of Shikhany, Saratov region, from 1972 until 1993. He said he handled foliant nerve agents for the last time in 1990. They were not on the list of chemical weapons submitted by Russia as part of the Chemical Weapons Convention signed in 1993.

In follow-up remarks to the Guardian, Uglev said he knew of three people who had died as a result of accidents while developing novichok: a scientist named Andrei Zheleznyakov and “two officers who held tests on our testing range”.

Asked by the Guardian about what the chances are that British investigators might be able to tie the novichok to a specific country or lab, he said “probably close to zero”.

“They have the footprint of the substance in Salisbury … but no data about the substance (its fingerprint) in the database, so how can they say where it is from,” he wrote.

That could change, he added, if they are able to gather earlier samples from Soviet and Russian labs. Russian police, he noted, were able to identify him quickly after the death of Kivelidi, the businessman, in 1995.

The poisons he helped develop in the 1970s and 1980s were especially lethal, he added.

“If any of these four substances” were used to poison the Skripals, he wrote, referring to several chemicals he helped developed, then “their chances are nil”.

“But medicine doesn’t stay in one place, and perhaps in the last 30 years, during which I’ve been out of the system, something has changed for the better.”