Vil Mirzayanov, 83, said he had no doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin was responsible, given that Russia maintains tight control over its Novichok stockpile and that the agent is too complicated for a non-state actor to have weaponized.
“The Kremlin all the time, like all criminals, denying - it doesn’t mean anything,” Mirzayanov said in an interview in his home in Princeton, New Jersey, where he has lived in exile for more than 20 years.
Mirzayanov said he spent years testing and improving Novichok, the name given to a group of chemical weapons that Russia secretly created during the latter stages of the Cold War. The weapon is more than 10 times as powerful as the more commonly known VX, another nerve agent.
The program eventually produced tons of the agent, the dissident said, which Russia has never acknowledged.
Novichok attacks the nervous system, making it impossible for victims to breathe and causing unimaginable pain, said Mirzayanov, who watched countless lab animals, including mice, rats and dogs, subjected to the poison.
“It’s torture,” he said. “It’s absolutely incurable.”
Mirzayanov said Putin likely chose to use a painful nerve agent to frighten other dissidents into silence.
Reuters
