Where did something come from

The nervous paralytic poison of Novice, which was poisoned by the former GRU employee Segre Skripal along with his daughter, was produced in a military laboratory in the closed city of Shikhana of the Saratov region. It is reported by The Times with reference to the British intelligence report provided to the allies of London.

It is reported that the British authorities used this report to convince the leaders of the allied countries of the involvement of Moscow in the poisoning of Skripal.

In Shihanan, there are the 33rd Central Research Institute of the Russian Ministry of Defense, as well as the 1st mobile brigade of the radiochembi protection of the Russian Armed Forces. The institute located in the city "is a head in the Ministry of Defense on the problems of radiation, chemical and biological protection," said in 2008 by its leader Colonel Sergei Kukhotkin.

British intelligence believes that at the Institute in Shikhanov over the past decades, the effectiveness of the "Novice" for murders abroad has been tested, the publication is noted.

"The reserves discovered in Shihan is too small to use them on the battlefield, why we can assume their use for point murders," the article says.

The Institute in Shikhanan appeared in the murder of banker Ivan Kivividi, who was poisoned by the Novice in 1995, - the chemist Leonid Rink worked there, who sold the poison. The then governor of the Saratov region, Dmitry Ayatskov, said that military chemists "were forced to shake their products from under the floor due to chronic lack of money." In Soviet times, the development and tests of Novice were carried out at the Institute in Shikhan, one of the participants in the creation of poison, emigrating to the United States, chemist Vil Mirzayanov. In the same institute, the author of the formula of the compound chemist Peter Kirpichev worked.

On Thursday, The Times reported with reference to a source in the British intelligence services that the country's intelligence with a high degree of probability established the place of production of Novice in Russia. Where exactly the poisonous substance was produced in the article was not specified. The British government had information about the place of production of poison on the fourth day after the poisoning of Skripal - it was obtained using scientific analysis and intelligence, approved in the publication.

On March 18, the head of the British Foreign Ministry Boris Johnson said that Moscow has secretly produced Novice over the past 10 years, accumulated its reserves, and also studied the use of chemical weapons to commit murders.

On Tuesday, the British Laboratory of Defense Studies and Technologies - the structure of the Ministry of Defense of the country - announced as a result of the analysis of the "Novice" samples that this poison could be produced only with the participation of the state , since the technology of its manufacture is extremely complicated. At the same time, chemists found it difficult to confirm that the poison was made in Russia. To do this, they explained, “other information” is needed, in particular intelligence data.