Alexei Navalny, a leading Russian dissident politician, anti-corruption campaigner, and outspoken opponent of President Vladimir Putin, was flown from the Siberian city of Omsk to Berlin on 22 August 2020. At the time, the 44-year-old Navalny was critically ill, on a life support machine, and it was suspected by many that he had been poisoned with some unidentified substance, despite views to the contrary from the Russian doctors who had been treating him. His doctors believed, at the time, that he was actually suffering from a “metabolic disorder”, possibly caused by low levels of blood glucose.
Navalny had suddenly fallen ill during a return flight from Tomsk to Moscow on 20 August. He had earlier been seen drinking tea, subsequently believed to have been spiked with an unknown chemical, at Tomsk airport. His plane had to make an emergency landing at Omsk, where he was rushed to Hospital No.1. After two days of intensive care in Omsk, Navalny was flown out of Russia on a medical evacuation aircraft to continue his treatment at the Charité Hospital in Berlin . His flight was funded by the Cinema for Peace Foundation, a German non-governmental organisation. Eventually, on 2 September, Steffen Seibert, a German government spokesman, confirmed that “a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group” had been identified in tests on samples taken from Navalny.
The term Novichok, or “newcomer”, refers to a group of nerve agents that were secretly developed in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. A series of Novichok variants were developed for use as chemical weapons in the Soviet Union from 1971 onward, as part of a programme code-named Foliant. The German identification of Novichok immediately led to comparisons with the Skripal incident of 4 March 2018, when ex-KGB Colonel Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with Novichok while at Zizzi’s restaurant in the English cathedral city of Salisbury. They were both successfully treated at Salisbury District Hospital, which benefited from its proximity to the specialist facilities for chemical warfare at the Porton Down Laboratories of Public Health England. Yulia was discharged from hospital on 9 April, followed by Sergei on 18 May. The responsible nerve agent did, however, kill an unintended victim, Dawn Sturgess, who died on 8 July 2018, after having handled a contaminated perfume bottle. The British claims of Novichok poisoning were to be confirmed independently, in due course, by a group of experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
The use of Novichok to poison the Skripals and, more recently, Navalny have inevitably led to accusations of Russian state involvement. These Russian products are currently listed in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ Schedule 1 of controlled substances, for which there is considered to be no legitimate use. Clearly, this proscription has failed to halt the production of these potent nerve agents, and yet their particular properties make them a dangerous tool in the hands of unscrupulous and authoritarian leaders.
The Novichoks are classified as irreversible cholinesterase inhibitors. Normally, when an electrical nerve impulse leads to muscle contraction, the message to the muscle is conveyed across the so-called “synaptic gap” between the nerve fibre and the muscle cell at the nerve-muscle junction. The chemical transmitter of the message at this junction is a substance known as acetylcholine. After acetylcholine interacts with receptors in the muscle, it is rapidly broken down by the enzyme cholinesterase. A failure to get rid of acetylcholine after it has accomplished its task causes a so-called cholinergic crisis, which is characteristic of poisoning with nerve agents.
The continuing accumulation, and unopposed effects, of acetylcholine lead to overstimulation of the parasympathetic component of the body’s autonomic or involuntary nervous system. This may cause blurred vision, profuse sweating, excessive salivation, watering of the eyes, nausea and vomiting, diarrhoea, wheezing, and increased urination, among other symptoms, which by themselves do not threaten life. The widespread paralysis of muscles caused by the accumulation of acetylcholine is, however, particularly dangerous, as it affects the muscles that enable us breathe, making it impossible to ventilate the lungs with oxygen. Consequently, the victims of Novichok poisoning may require prolonged periods of time hooked up to a ventilator to help their breathing, but even then recovery is by no means certain.
The stability, high toxicity, and rapid onset of action of Novichoks, along with a difficulty of detection, help explain their use as potential chemical weapons of death. These fourth-generation nerve agents are at least five to eight times more toxic than earlier VX nerve agents. As “binary weapons”, Novichoks can be transported, handled and stored as less toxic precursors that are then mixed together just before use. The victim may either inhale or swallow the reconstituted poison, or absorb it through intact skin. The irreversible inactivation of cholinesterase means that the usual antidotes to cholinesterase inhibitors, such as atropine or pralidoxime, are only partly effective. Novichoks are versatile poisons and can be used in a variety of different forms- as an ultra-fine powder, a liquid, an aerosol, or as a gas.
A high level of secrecy is unavoidable when it comes to the use of chemical weapons, the use of which is almost universally condemned. How Navalny came to be poisoned may never be revealed. What is noteworthy, however, is that when the liberal West hailed the demise of Communism in the Soviet Union, it failed to predict that the agents of the new Russian state would choose to retain many of the repressive devices of their Communist predecessors. It seems likely that Novichok will remain in use for the foreseeable future, despite all international criticisms of its use.
Ashis Banerjee