NEW YORK. March 15 (Interfax) - It is highly probable that the Novichok agent was made in the UK, Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya said at the UN Security Council's meeting on the poisoning of former Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) colonel Sergei Skripal.
"In the middle of the 1990s, Western security services took a number of our specialists, whose names are known, to the West, in addition to certain documents, and continued research in this field in the United Kingdom and the United States, amongst other countries. The fact that those countries created new toxic agents, which for some reason the West describes with the general term Novichok, has been confirmed and mentioned by over 200 open sources in NATO member countries. We have those references. And we are ready to present them," Nebenzya said.
"Actually, the toxic agent allegedly used in that incident was identified by a scientific-and-technological center of the British Defense Ministry, where chemical weapons of this and other type were developed," he said.
"The most probable origin of this agent is the countries which have been actively researching such substances since the late 1990s, among them the UK," Nebenzya said.
"You and I are not chemists. But let me tell you about the opinion of a professional chemist: British specialists had to have the so-called control standard in order to definitively identify the gas as Novichok. A comparison with the standard is required to prove that this is the exact compound. If they say this is the Novichok gas, they a priori must have the standard, collection, and formula of this substance," he said.
"In other words, if the UK is sure this is the Novichok gas, it must have the chemical formula and samples and be able to produce it," Nebenzya said.
"There have been no research-and-development projects in Russia under the Novichok code name," he said.