- Novichok, the nerve agent that Germany says was used to poison Alexei Navalny, a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin who is in a coma in a Berlin hospital, was developed in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s.
- The name Novichok means “newcomer”. It is used for a family of highly toxic nerve agents with a composition slightly different from the better known poison gases VX and sarin.
- Novichok agents are believed to be five to 10 times more lethal than those substances, although there are no known uses before 2018, when Novichok was deployed in Britain on a former Russian spy and his daughter.
- Moscow is not believed ever to have declared Novichok or its ingredients to the Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which oversees a treaty banning their use.
- The weaponisation of any chemical is banned under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, of which Moscow is a signatory.
- In November 2019, members of the OPCW agreed to expand its list of banned “Schedule 1” chemicals to include Novichok agents. That ban went into effect on June 7, 2020.
- Novichok was made with agrochemicals so that its production could more readily be hidden within a legitimate commercial industry.
- Russia and the United States once ran two of the largest chemical weapons programs in the world.
- Russia completed the destruction of a stockpile declared to the OPCW last year.
- The United States is in the final stages of destroying its own stockpile.
- However, publications about development and testing of Novichok in the 1990s raised U.S. suspicions that the Soviet Union had a secret weapons program, and did not declare its full stockpile when it joined the OPCW.
- The chemical “causes a slowing of the heart and restriction of the airways, leading to death by asphyxiation”.
- Britain says Russia used Novichok to poison former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the British city of Salisbury two years ago.
- Russia has repeatedly denied any involvement in the attack, which the Skripals survived.
