I hadn’t heard about this. This excerpt is from Bellingcat’s report on the subject:
A year-long investigation by Bellingcat and its investigative partners The Insider and Der Spiegel, with contributing investigations from RFE/RL, has discovered evidence that Russia continued its Novichok development program long beyond the officially announced closure date. Data shows that military scientists, who were involved with the original chemical weapons program while it was still run by the Ministry of Defense, were dispersed into several research entities which continued collaborating among one another in a clandestine, distributed R&D program. While some of these institutes were integrated with the Ministry of Defense – but camouflaged their work as research into antidotes to organophosphate poisoning – other researchers moved to civilian research institutes but may have continued working, under cover of civilian research, on the continued program.
Our investigative team believes the St. Petersburg State Institute for Experimental Military Medicine of the Ministry of Defense (“GNII VMâ€), likely with the assistance of researchers from the Scientific Center Signal (“SC Signalâ€), has since 2010 taken the lead role in the continued R&D and weaponization of the Soviet-era Novichok program.
Crucially for our conclusions, we have identified evidence showing close coordination between these two institutes and a secretive sub-unit of Military Unit 29155 of Russia’s military intelligence, the GRU. This unit has previously been linked to the poisoning attempts on Emilian Gebrev in Bulgaria in 2015 as well as Sergey and Yula Skripal in the United Kingdom in 2018. Telecoms data we obtained shows that the St. Petersurg-based institute communicated intensively with members of the assassination team during the planning stage of the Skripal mission, while also communicating – at highly correlated moments – with scientists from SC Signal.
and here are the editors’ of the Washington Post’s remarks on it:
While the Chemical Weapons Convention has allowances for developing antidotes and defenses against chemical weapons, actually producing and using Novichok to poison the Skripals and Mr. Navalny are treaty violations. Recently, the European Union and Britain acted, but the Trump administration remains strangely silent about sanctions in response to the Navalny attack. Bipartisan groups of lawmakers in the House and Senate are urging a tougher response. Both the E.U. and the United States should investigate the newly identified research organizations. When the states parties to the treaty meet Nov. 30 to Dec. 4, they should consider a strong response.
I agree. These are serious violations but it’s unclear to me what steps might be taken that haven’t already been taken. The only thing I can think of is to restart chemical weapons development of our own which is no solution to the problem. I wish that the editors had expanded a bit more on what they have in mind. Will their concern continue if Biden is elected president?
I was originally driven to the article from the WaPo editorial. My first reaction to the editorial were that it was guilt by association and that Russia is not the Soviet Union but the various reports provide what appears to me to be undeniable evidence.
I have been complaining about distributed military research for years, decades I guess. It’s not just a problem within Russia. I find what I suspect to be distributed research among North Korea, Iran, and maybe other parties (Burma?) even more disturbing. Russia, at least, is still a rational actor but I’m not so sure about the outlaw regimes of the world.
We have distributed research here – probably constituting the vast majority of it.
As far as what to do about Russia, we and Europe need to do a better job of tracking Russian agents. Bellingcat has done an amazing job of proving that a number of people involved in various assassinations and attempts are, in fact, Russian agents. If Bellingcat can do this with open sources, the intelligence communities of NATO countries should be able to ID them even more quickly and arrest or track them as they travel in Europe.
I’m aware of that. A number of years ago I was ushered into the office of the president of a prospect and saw something I, presumably, was not supposed to see on his desk. Relatively small company. Being able to read circuit diagrams regardless of their orientation is a useful skill to have. I could tell immediately what I was looking at and, if I had been a government representative, they would have lost their security clearance.
Every major country, including explicitly the US, UK, France, Germany, Israel, Russia, and China continue to conduct research into both chemical and biological weapons, despite and treaty commitments. It is almost certain that Iran, Japan, Taiwan, and North and South Korea do, too.
The US also still has a stockpile of binary chemical weapons outside Denver at a chemical destruction facility. The chemicals were supposed to have been destroyed by now, but destruction rate has been lackadaisical at best. Budgetary problems, you know.
Just how many stockpiles of chemicals and bioweapons still exist is unknown, all were supposed to have been destroyed decades ago.
PS. The so-called novichok attack on the Skripals occurred next door to Britain’s own Porton Down chemical warfare laboratory.