The Skripal Poisoning - A Very Deep British Affair

[David Guyatt]

Today's Guardian carries an article that discusses what was posted here a day or two earlier - and which I've generally known about for almost 3 weeks and posted elsewhere at least a week ago. probably longer.

We now live in a world where ordinary people like you and I do the deep research and publish their findings on those blogs and forums that our masters and betters like to denigrate as "fake news" sites --- and nick and twist it to suit propaganda aims and all without giving credit to the source of their theft, in this case The Bell.

From The Independent:

Nerve agent was used in 1995 murder, claims former Soviet scientist

Vladimir Uglev, developer of Soviet-era chemical weapons, contradicts Russian denials at existence of novichok nerve agents



Andrew Roth in Moscow
Fri 23 Mar 2018 18.33 GMTLast modified on Fri 23 Mar 2018 22.00 GMT[/FONT]

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Russian soldiers check metal containers with toxic agents at a chemical weapons storage site in the Saratov region in 2000. Photograph: APA 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

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"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.
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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.
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I hink it needs to at least be pointed out that in 1995 the Soviet Union was deceased, and that Novichok programme had been researched during the Soviet era in what is now Uzbekistan - which is no longer a part of the Russian Federation. To my knowledge only one nation worked with Uzbekistan to eradicate their CB Warfare programme and that was the USA.

So, besides the mafia, the US also had access to any Novichok research available. This doesn't in my opinion, translate to imply, as the Guardian has done saying that it "contradict[s] official Russian denials that the country had any chemical weapons programme tied to the name novichok, with the formal codename foliant.[/FONT]"

This comment is utter knee-jerk propagandistic balls in my opinion. "What country" was the Guardian's Andrew Roth speaking of? Russia? Or the Soviet Union? For me he's doing what so many continue to do and conflate the two nations.

Of course one couldn't expect a mere broadsheet newspaper to delve and investigate this matter deeply (after all it takes at least a couple of minutes on Google).

But at least The Guardian, after pointing the mandatory finger at Russia, reaches the obvious conclusion in the last para that the fact destroys Theresa May's tosh statement that only Russia can be blamed.