AP is now reporting that Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Soviet-Era nerve agent.
Quote:
Specialist labs in France and Sweden have confirmed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok, the German government said Monday.
Link to AP article
here.
Novichok is originally a name for a nerve agent program started in the Soviet Union, and a series of agents developed in this program were referred to as "novichoks".
Science Direct article on the Novichok program and the weapons it developed
here. (It's science, but it is also bloody good reading for anyone interested in a bit of cold war arms race and secret weapon programs).
The poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal in March 2018 was also done with a novichok nerve agent. Investigations revealed the assassins to be an active members of the Russian military intelligence service (GRU), colonel Anatoliy Chepiga and Dr. Alexander Mishkin, a doctor working in GRU's main directorate. Skripal was, as some you might now, a former GRU officer who was in the 90s and early 2000s
working as a double agent for the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).
Last edited by tame_deuces; 09-14-2020 at 05:03 AM.
Reason: Double-checked some details and corrected the Skripal story