Only “a state actor” could have produced the chemical weapon used to poison a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom, British military scientists said Tuesday.
“[The poison required] extremely sophisticated methods to create, something only in the capabilities of a state actor,” Defense Science and Technology Laboratory CEO Gary Aitkenhead, who leads the British military’s research arm, told Sky News.
British Prime Minister Theresa May accused Russia of using “a military grade nerve agent” developed during the Cold War in the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, a former double agent convicted of feeding secrets to the United Kingdom. The incident led to Western countries expelling scores of Russian diplomats and intelligence officials, even as President Vladimir Putin’s government denied responsibility.
“We were able to identify it as novichok, to identify that it was military-grade nerve agent,” Aitkenhead said. “We have not identified the precise source, but we have provided the scientific info to Government who have then used a number of other sources to piece together the conclusions you have come to.”
Russian officials cited that comment as an indication that the United Kingdom can’t prove that the Kremlin was behind the attack.
“London somehow will have to offer its apologies to the Russian side, but obviously it is going to be a long story and the idiocy of it has gone too far,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday, per TASS, a state-run media outlet. “The situation was iniquitous for us from the very beginning. And now there emerge evidence that these mad accusations the British side voiced just a few hours after the incident are based on nothing. These are telling official evidence from experts.”
British officials aren’t wavering in their conclusion that Putin, who vowed in 2010 that traitors to the Russian state would be killed, is responsible for the attack.
“This is only one part of the intelligence picture,” a spokesperson for the U.K.’s Foreign Office said in reference to the analysis of the poison. “This includes our knowledge that within the last decade, Russia has investigated ways of delivering nerve agents — probably for assassination — and as part of this program has produced and stockpiled small quantities of Novichoks. Russia’s record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations; and our assessment that Russia views former intelligence officers as targets.”
Russian diplomats have suggested that British officials poisoned Skripal in order to spark an international controversy. “The Skripal affair was used in order to tighten the ranks of the European Union and NATO, which loosened lately, and to inject another portion of Russophobia,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksander Grushko said Tuesday.
