Russian developed poison Novichok used in attempted murder in Britain

Washington Post/NDTV:

Thanks to the Russian nerve agent "Novichok," I once got to see the inside of an interrogation room at Lefortovo, the old KGB prison on the east side of Moscow.

It was in 1993. The Russians were not pleased that I had written an article the year before disclosing the existence of Novichok, identified Monday by British investigators as the weapon used last week in the attempted murder of former Soviet spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.

The nerve agent was top secret back then, especially sensitive because the Soviet Union, under Mikhail Gorbachev, had renounced the use and production of chemical weapons. Its existence came to light thanks to the scruples of a brave scientist named Vil Mirzayanov, who had worked at the State Union Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology. The institute was described by one its top officials as "the leader in the technology of chemical destruction."

On a gray September afternoon, Mirzayanov and a scientist-activist named Lev Fyodorov came by the Moscow office of the Baltimore Sun, where I was working. The Cold War was supposedly over, and Mirzayanov had been growing more and more angry over the secret weapons work. He decided to go public, and the two scientists told me that they had arranged to publish an article the next day in the Moskovsky Novosti newspaper. But, they said, they thought they could ensure some measure of security for themselves by also getting the story out in the West. After all, they reasoned, the United States and Russia were on friendly terms, American aid was crucial to Russian stability and no one should have any need of nerve agents.

They told me Russia had a nerve agent 10 times more powerful than VX, a powerful chemical weapon, and that work on it was continuing. I wrote a story that day after checking in with Western experts, who were skeptical of the claim - to put it mildly. But in the month that followed, I tracked down more scientists who worked at the institute and wrote a fuller story that named the new agent: Novichok No. 5.
I learned that research on Novichok had begun in 1987, even as the Soviet Union said it would unilaterally halt all its chemical-weapons programs. It had been developed at the institute and tested in a place called Shikhani, in southeastern Russia, and in the Nukus region of Uzbekistan. I spoke to one scientist, Andrei Zheleznyakov, who had been exposed to a minute amount of Novichok in a lab accident five years prior. He staggered out after the mishap, his vision, as I wrote, "seared by brilliant colors and hallucinations." Zheleznyakov never fully recovered, and he died shortly after I interviewed him.

The Russian government, by then under Boris Yeltsin, said that it had never renounced doing research on chemical weapons strictly for defensive purposes. It said Russia was not stockpiling Novichok, which explains why it had not felt obligated to report its existence under chemical-weapons conventions.
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There is more.

This looks like a mistake by the Russians.  In using a proprietary lethal nerve agent they just made deniability of the operation virtually impossible.  It was a sign of arrogance that will have repercussions against the Russian government and will ultimately backfire on Putin unless he turns on those responsible for the assassination attempt.