Expelled Russian diplomats head home as U.K. mulls further poisoning response

Russia responded on 17 March by expelling 23 British diplomats, canceling an agreement to reopen the British Consulate in St. Petersburg, and ordering the closure of the British Council — which promotes cultural ties between the countries — in Russia.

The poisoning has added to already high tensions between the West and Russia, where the long-ruling Putin won a new six-year term in a landslide in a March 18 election marred by alleged fraud and what international observers said was the lack of a “real choice.”

In a show of solidarity with Britain on 19 March, the European Union and NATO strongly condemned the poisoning, which NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called an “unacceptable breach of international norms and rules.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said that Russia must explain the incident and stressed the importance of the EU acting as a whole in response.

“Serious information suggests that Russia has something to do with this. It’s now up to Russia to prove that that’s not the case,” Merkel said.

“We agreed to say that the European Union needs to provide a firm response, and not just a symbolic one,” Morawiecki said. “The Russian aggressor needs to know that it can’t allow itself to attack a NATO member.”

EU foreign ministers issued a statement saying the bloc “takes extremely seriously the U.K. government’s assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian Federation is responsible.”

“The lives of many citizens were threatened by this reckless and illegal act,” the EU ministers said.

The bloc “expresses its unqualified solidarity with the U.K. and its support, including for the U.K.’s efforts to bring those responsible for this crime to justice,” it said.

Novichok creator speaks up

Putin flatly rejected Britain’s accusations hours after polls closed in the Russian election, telling reporters that Russia “has no such” weapon.

On 20 March, Peskov repeated Russia’s denial, saying that Russia had destroyed all its chemical weapons and “has no chemical weapons stockpiles in any form.”

Meanwhile, a Russian scientist said that he had helped create Novichok-series nerve agents, contradicting Russian officials who have said that neither Russia nor the Soviet Union ever had such a program.

Leonid Rink told Russian state news agency RIA Novosti it was “hard to imagine that Russians were involved,” suggesting that Russian operatives would not have carried out such an attack without killing the targets immediately.

“Such outrageous incompetence…is just laughable and unacceptable,” Rink said. He also said it would not make sense for Russian agents to use a chemical that could be traced to Russia.

“There are lots of more suitable substances,” he said. “To fire [the equivalent of] a powerful rocket at someone who is not a threat and to miss would be the height of idiocy.”

Asked if he was one of Novichok’s creators, Rink told RIA Novosti: “Yes. It was the basis for my doctoral dissertation.”

He said he had worked at a Soviet chemical-weapons research facility in the town of Shikhany, in Russia’s Saratov region, for 27 years until the early 1990s.

He said Novichok was not a single substance but a system of using chemical weapons, and that it had been called “Novichok-5” by the Soviet Union.

“A big group of specialists in Shikhany and in Moscow worked on Novichok — on the technologies, toxicologies, and biochemistry,” he said. “In the end we achieved very good results.”

May rejected Russia’s denials on 19 May, saying, “I am clear that what we have seen shows that there is no other conclusion but the Russia state is culpable for what happened.”

French President Emmanuel Macron called on Russia to “shed light on the responsibilities for the unacceptable attack” in Salisbury in a phone call with Putin.

He also urged Moscow to “firmly regain control of any programs that have not been declared” to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), according to a statement from the French president’s office.

OPCW inspectors on 19 March began running independent tests on samples taken from Salisbury to verify the British analysis, media reported.

Skripal is a former Russian military intelligence officer who was convicted of treason in 2006 after a court found that he passed the identities of Russian intelligence agents to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

He was one of four Russian prisoners released in 2010 in exchange for 10 Russian sleeper agents uncovered in the United States, including Anna Chapman, in one of the biggest spy swaps since the Cold War.

This article is published courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty