Novichok is the notorious warfighting poison which has killed no one but fooled everyone.
At least that’s how British Government officials, their scientists, chemical warfighters, policemen, media reporters, and trailing after them all, their judges, intend the story to be told.
Theirs is the story of the assassination, ordered by President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and attempted on March 4, 2018, by two military officers tracked and filmed to every location but not the murder scene; with a weapon not detected at the scene nor in the blood streams and bodily tissues of their murder targets.
The victims, Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal, have been made to disappear and are either incommunicado in prison or dead. The only direct testimony which has been recorded voluntarily in front of witnesses was given by Yulia Skripal, in hospital four days after the attack, when she identified the assassination attempt as having been carried out with poison spray by an attacker who was not Russian, just minutes before she and her father collapsed. She meant the poison was British; the assassin British.
The motive for the Novichok crime turns out to be hearsay by British government against the Russian government.
In political and military terms, the Novichok poison story is propaganda between enemies at war. Judgement of what happened to the Skripals is a weapon of this war. And so it has turned out that there has been no court trial or test of the Novichok narrative, according to British law. Instead, there has been a proceeding which looked like a court trial but wasn’t; in which the Skripals were represented by police interrogators and by lawyers who said nothing; presided over by a judge who wasn’t.
In other words, a show trial in a time of war.
The truth of what happened has no military or political value, certainly not to the prosecuting British side; not much to the defending Russian side. But as the evidence has surfaced piecemeal over the past five years since the first investigation was published in February 2020 as Skripal in Prison, the truth reveals that Novichok was ineffective as a poison, but very successful as a deception operation by the British. They reversed the hands of the assassin, planted a British-made chemical weapon to look like a Russian one; invented the death of bystander Dawn Sturgess to substitute for Sergei and Yulia Skripal who didn’t die; and suppressed the evidence of what had happened – witnesses, videotapes, toxicology, autopsy records.
Not quite all the evidence, however. This book has been written to reveal new evidence to conclude that Sergei Skripal was a triple agent attempting to return to Russia. His rescue, the exfiltration operation by the Russian military intelligence organisation (GRU), used decoys to mislead the British surveillance and conceal the escape plan. But the British anticipated and decided to act preemptively, attacking both Skripals, reversing culpability, and convicting the Russians for the British crime.
Not one of the legal, medical, police, or government officials engaged in the Novichok story — neither the Skripal nor the Sturgess parts of the narrative — answered the many questions put to them during the seven-year course of the case and of this book. The three lawyers purportedly engaged to represent Sergei and Yulia Skripal were the most silentious of all; their names don’t warrant repeating. Not much better were the lawyers representing Dawn Sturgess’s family’s money claim, especially their lead counsel Michael Mansfield.
This blanket of misrepresentation, evasion, and silence which they have thrown over themselves and over the evidence in the case is proof of the intention to deceive. So determined is this intention, the deceivers don’t realize how preposterous are the results. The colour of Novichok, for example, reported as a state secret in Chapter 74.
A direct request to researchers publishing on A-234 around the world has revealed that the Iranians who reported synthesizing the chemical agent in 2016, reply that it is colourless. The British, Americans, Czechs, and Koreans who have done the same laboratory work, refuse to answer. And yet, despite all the preliminary vetting by British intelligence agents, years of double-checking by British officials, and months of closed-door sessions and redactions ordered by Lord Hughes, chairman of the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry, the truth managed to slip out. A man named Josep Vivas, a Spaniard living in Barcelona, was the unintended, unguarded source.
Vivas was a vice president of Puig, the company which manufactures and sells the bottled perfume which in the British Novichok story has been turned into the Russian murder weapon. “I am making this statement,” Vivas signed for the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry on February 12, 2024, “in addition to a letter I provided on 27 July 2018. Prior to me writing and signing that letter, I was shown a number of images of a small perfume bottle branded ‘Nina Ricci Premier Jour Perfume’. The images I viewed were under police exhibit reference [redaction tagged VN551/10]. I was shown further images of a perfume box labelled as ‘Premier Jour Nina Ricci’. This was under police exhibit reference [redaction tagged VN521/3]. On Friday 2nd February 2024, I was again shown the images of [redaction tagged VN551/10] and [redaction tagged VN521/3] before signing this statement and I set out my observations on them below.”
The photographs of the poison bottle shown in the public hearing on November 28, 2024, were censored — a large black mark was pasted across the bottle contents. But British agents had shown Vivas the photographs just days after July 11, 2018, when the bottle was purportedly discovered at the Sturgess crime scene. Vivas was shown the photographs again more than five years later, just before he testified before Hughes. He saw the bottle without the black mark.
Censored police photograph of Novichok poison weapon, a perfume atomizer bottle, allegedly found on a kitchen bench at Rowley-Sturgess home eleven days after Sturgess and Rowley were hospitalized. The black mark conceals the British Government’s lie.
The key observation Vivas confirmed he had seen on both occasions was this: “The liquid inside the bottle. Premier Jour perfume is pale pink, and from the photos I observe that the liquid contained in the bottle is yellow.”
If the perfume is pink; if Novichok is colourless; if the liquid in the murder weapon was yellow, then the liquid in the murder weapon cannot have been Novichok. QED — Quod erat demonstrandum, as the ancient lawyers and logicians used to conclude their proofs. The colour yellow was a British fabrication; the black mark was British camouflage. The secret slipped out into the open by British mistake.
From whom are the British keeping their secret? Can it be the Russians who, according to the official Novichok narrative, have made, stored, and used it against the Skripals, but have yet to learn what colour it is?
The Russian handling of the Skripal affair is a different story. It has been defensive on the evidence claimed by the British government; ineffective in breaking the silence imposed on the Skripals.
These outcomes were inevitable once it is concluded, in retrospect, that Sergei Skripal was attacked to prevent his return to Moscow as a triple agent; and that the Russian military operation to rescue him had been thwarted by the British.
These two truths, if published officially, leaked to the press, or reported in independent investigations, stood little chance of being believed outside Russia. More certainly, official Russian admission of the two truths, if it had been made, would have condemned the Skripals to the death that was attempted by the British against them on March 4, 2018.
Less explicable is the outcome that for seven years now, Russian press reporting of the case has ignored the investigative reporting published in English in the UK and US, and then the evidence revealed during the Hughes hearings in London between October and December 2024. This is an understandable result of the line dictated by the Kremlin’s and Foreign Ministry’s media departments for protecting the lives of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, and for salvaging what remained of Anglo-Russian relations on the road to war in the Ukraine.
In the chapters to follow, President Putin’s and Foreign Minister Lavrov’s statements can be examined in the political context and news sequence in which they were made.
From the beginning, the Russian Embassy in London issued formal requests for consular access to the Skripals and protest notes when this was denied by the Foreign Office. In reply to British stonewalling on access and propagandizing the allegations against the Russian government, the Embassy issued a detailed summary of every action Russian officials had taken and the statements they made.
The one option the Embassy in London did not take was to engage British lawyers to obtain a hearing and an order of habeas corpus in the High Court to compel the appearance of the Skripals to testify for themselves. This option was obvious to the Embassy and lawyers in London between March 21, 2018, when the Home Office went to the court for legal authority to allow blood testing of the Skripals, and April 9, when Salisbury District Hospital announced that Yulia Skripal had been released; and then on May 18 when Sergei Skripal was also discharged from hospital.
During this period it was reported that Yulia was able to telephone her cousin Viktoria in Russia. Years later, as Chapters 67, 71, and 73 reveal, it became clear in retrospect that Yulia had recovered consciousness in hospital much earlier than the hospital allowed to be known, and that doctors had then forcibly sedated her. At the time the Russian Embassy was announcing it “questioned the authenticity” of the statements issued by the London police and media on Yulia’s behalf. The Embassy was right; it was not believed.
It is possible the Embassy did attempt to engage barristers to go to court for a habeas corpus hearing for the Skripals, but learned that no one would take the case. At the time I made an independent request for this engagement to the well-known human rights barristers in London; the outcome was that none agreed to represent the Skripals. The refusals were point-blank – no one would give a reason.
British officials anticipated that an effort might succeed in forcing a High Court hearing, however. So, on May 24, 2018, a one minute fifty-five second speech by Yulia Skripal was presented on video in which she spoke from a script and appeared to sign a statement. Referring to “offers of assistance from the Russian Embassy,” she claimed “at the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services.” Skripal’s Russian text spoke of “help” from the Russian Embassy: “now I don’t want and [I am] not ready to use it.”
“Obviously, Yulia was reading a pre-written text,” the Russian Embassy responded publicly. “[This] was a translation from English and had been initially written by a native English-speaker…With all respect for Yulia’s privacy and security, this video does not discharge the UK authorities from their obligations under Consular Conventions.”
Excerpted frames from Yulia Skripal’s brief videotaped appearance at a US nuclear bomber base in England on May 2018; watch the tape in full here. By subtle signals, Skripal indicated she was being made to speak and to sign under duress. Two script pages were visible on a side table during the filming; the one on top Skripal was filmed signing. The two papers were in a different handwriting from Skripal’s signature and in a different pen from the pen she is seen to use. On the top page, apparently the Russian language text, Skripal added words after her signature; these are her first and family names in Russian, but without her patronymic, as Russians usually record their names in official documents. The handwriting of that name and the handwriting of the Russian statement are not the same. Nor the pen and ink used. Ten weeks earlier, on March 8, 2018, Yulia had woken from a coma in hospital and signaled to the doctor at her bedside that she had been attacked by the British, not by the Russians. Read this evidence for the first time in the new book.
At first, Putin he seemed unprepared on the facts of the case – the Russian facts – and unprepared for the British government’s propaganda blitz.
The president cannot have been unprepared. On March 15, 2018, the Kremlin revealed that at a Security Council meeting on that day Putin was briefed by the Foreign and Defense Ministers and the intelligence chiefs. “While talking about international affairs,” the official communiqué said, “the Council members held an in-depth discussion on Russia-UK relations against the backdrop of Sergei Skripal’s case. They expressed grave concern over the destructive and provocative position of the British side.”
The line which Putin and his advisers decided at that meeting they planned to follow in public was revealed by Putin three days later at a press conference. He tried to feign ignorance himself, and then dissimulated on the weapon, the motive, and the opportunity. “Regarding the tragedy you have mentioned,” Putin told reporters, “I learned about it from the media. The first thing that comes to mind is that, had it been a warfare agent, the victims would have died immediately. It is an obvious fact which must be taken into account. This is first.”
“The second is that Russia does not have such chemical agents. We destroyed all our chemical weapons, and international observers monitored the destruction process. Moreover, we were the first to do this, unlike some of our partners who promised to destroy their chemical weapons but have not done so to this day, regrettably. Therefore, we are ready for cooperation, as we said immediately. We are ready to take part in any investigations necessary, provided the other side wants this too. We do not see their interest so far, but we have not removed the possibility of cooperation on this matter from the agenda.”
“As for the overall situation, I believe that any reasonable person can see that this is total nonsense. It is unthinkable that anyone on Russia would do such a thing ahead of the presidential election and the FIFA World Cup. Absolutely unthinkable. However, we are ready for cooperation despite the above things. We are ready to discuss any issues and to deal with any problems.”
On April 4, 2018, he said: “We do not expect anything other than for common sense to ultimately prevail and for international relations not to be damaged the way we have seen recently. This goes not only for this case, the attempt on Skripal’s life. This has to do with other aspects of international relations as well. We should stay within the framework of healthy political processes based on fundamental norms of international law, and then the situation in the world will become more stable and predictable.”
On May 18, at a news conference following a meeting with then-Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, Putin said: “Now regarding Mr Skripal. Yes, I also heard from the media today that he has been released from hospital. We wish him the best of health, we are really very happy. I have several considerations in this respect. First. I think if a combat-grade nerve agent had been used, as claimed by our British colleagues, the man would have died on the spot. A nerve agent is so powerful that a person dies instantly or within several seconds or minutes. Fortunately, he is alive, he got well, was released from hospital and I hope he will live a healthy and safe life.”
“As to the investigation, on our part we offered every assistance in the investigation to our British partners on a number of occasions, and asked for access to this investigation. There has been no response so far. Our proposals remain in place.”
Putin was accusing the British government of a cover-up, but softly, by innuendo. “The most objective explanation to what happened”, he said on May 25, “can be only provided as a result of a thorough, unbiased and joint – the latter is very important – investigation. We proposed working on it together from the very beginning, but as you know, the British side rejected our offer and investigated the incident alone. It is also a fact, as this was announced at the very beginning, that the victims were poisoned – if it was a poisoning – with a chemical warfare agent. I have spoken about this before, but I will say again that although I am not an expert on chemical warfare agents, I can imagine that the use of such agents should result in the almost instantaneous death of the victims. Thank God, nothing like this happened in the case of the Skripals, and that Skripal himself and his daughter are alive, have been discharged from hospital and, as we have seen on television, his daughter looks quite well. Thank God, they are alive and healthy.”
“Therefore, I believe it would be wrong to say that it was a chemical warfare agent. If so, everything the British side has said can be called into question. How can we settle this? We should either conduct a comprehensive and objective joint investigation, or stop talking about it because it will only worsen our relations.”
If Putin was trying to ameliorate these relations with London, he tried, six months later, to appear to be condemning Sergei Skripal, burying both him and the reciprocal espionage the two governments were conducting against each other. Was Putin calculating that if the British had tried but failed to kill both Skripals, he might yet save their lives? Understandably, no Russian could acknowledge this — certainly not then and not now.
In a Moscow forum in October 2018, six months after the Salisbury incidents, Putin responded to questions from a US journalist. “As regards the Skripals and all that, this latest spy scandal is being artificially inflated. I have seen some media outlets and your colleagues push the idea that Skripal is almost a human rights activist. But he is just a spy, a traitor to the motherland. There is such a term, a ‘traitor to the motherland,’ and that’s what he is. Imagine you are a citizen of a country, and suddenly somebody comes along who betrays your country. How would you, or anybody present here, a representative of any country, feel about such a person? He is scum, that’s all. But a whole information campaign has been deployed around it.”
“I think it will come to an end, I hope it will, and the sooner the better. We have repeatedly told our colleagues to show us the documents. We will see what can be done and conduct an investigation. We probably have an agreement with the UK on assistance in criminal cases that outlines the procedure. Well, submit the documents to the Prosecutor General’s Office as required. We will see what actually happened there. The fuss between security services did not start yesterday. As you know, espionage, just like prostitution, is one of the most ‘important’ jobs in the world. So what? Nobody shut it down and nobody can shut it down yet.”
“[Question] Ryan Chilcote: Espionage aside, I think there are two other issues. One is the use of chemical weapons, and let’s not forget that in addition to the Skripal family being affected in that attack, there was also a homeless person [Dawn Sturgess] who was killed when they came in contact with the nerve agent Novichok.”
“[Answer] Vladimir Putin: Listen, since we are talking about poisoning Skripal, are you saying that we also poisoned a homeless person there? Sometimes I look at what is happening around this case and it amazes me. Some guys came to England and started poisoning homeless people. Such nonsense. What is this all about? Are they working for cleaning services? Nobody wanted to poison… This Skripal is a traitor, as I said. He was caught and punished. He spent a total of five years in prison. We released him. That’s it. He left. He continued to cooperate with and consult some security services. So what? What are we talking about right now? Oil, gas or espionage? What is your question? Let’s move on to the other oldest profession and discuss the latest developments in that business. (Laughter.)”
The British Prime Minister Theresa May and her ambitious rival, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, ignored Putin’s request to put the Skripal affair aside. Instead, they escalated, publishing photographs of police and intelligence agency surveillance of the Russian military officers who were then charged with the attempted Novichok murder. Putin was put on the defensive again.
The British inventors of Novichok – left to right — Alexander Younger, head of MI6, and Mark Sedwill, National Security Advisor and Cabinet Secretary, created the Novichok plot to prevent Sergei Skripal returning to Moscow and to persuade Prime Minister Theresa May, then her successor Boris Johnson, to escalate their war against Russia.
On September 12, 2018 – seven days after the Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Service announced their charges against Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – Putin was asked who were they were. “Either they deliberately poked their faces towards the camera in order to be photographed, or they are completely unprofessional to have their images captured by all the cameras. Perhaps you have a third theory?”
“Vladimir Putin: Actually, we have, of course, taken a look at these people. We already know who they are, and we have located them. I hope they will show up and tell everyone about themselves. This would be better for everyone. I assure you that there is nothing special or criminal here. We will see shortly.”
“Sergei Brilyov: Are they civilians?”
“Vladimir Putin: Of course, they are civilians.”
“Sergei Brilyov: All right, we will wait.”
“Vladimir Putin: I would like to address them, so they can hear us today. Let them come to a media outlet and tell everything.”
The results followed swiftly – an interview by Russia Today (RT), the state media agency, with the two accused Russians pretending to have been innocent tourists; then British and US intelligence data leaked through the Bellingcat organization. These propaganda episodes can be followed in Part I of the book. Putin decided not to add fuel to this fire; he ignored questions about the Skripal case for seven months, until June of 2019.
“Do you think that there is a possibility of some improvement in Anglo-Russian relations,” he was asked by the editor of the Financial Times of London on June 27, 2019, “– and that we can move on from some of these issues that are obviously of great sensitivity, like the Skripal affair?”
“As a matter of fact,” Putin answered, “treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it. Not at all. But traitors must be punished. This gentleman, Skripal, had already been punished. He was arrested, sentenced and then served time in prison. He received his punishment. For that matter, he was off the radar. Why would anybody be interested in him? He got punished. He was detained, arrested, sentenced and then spent five years in prison. Then he was released and that was it. As concerns treason, of course, it must be punishable. It is the most despicable crime that one can imagine.”
The president had promoted Skripal from “scum” who deserved his fate to “gentleman” who had been punished enough. Putin’s purpose was to propose again to the British that they set aside the Novichok narrative and opt instead for improving the bilateral relationship at the government level, and sticking to business as usual; by that Putin meant oligarch business.
“Listen, all this fuss about spies and counter-spies, it is not worth serious interstate relations. This spy story, as we say, it is not worth five kopecks. Or even five pounds, for that matter. And the issues concerning interstate relations, they are measured in billions and the fate of millions of people. How can we compare one with the other? The list of accusations and allegations against one another could go on and on. They say, ‘You poisoned the Skripals.’ Firstly, this must be proved.”
“Secondly, the average person listens and says, ‘Who are these Skripals?’ And it turns out that Skripal was engaged in espionage against us [Russia]. So this person asks the next question, ‘Why did you spy on us using Skripal? Maybe you should not have done that?’ You know, these questions are infinite. We need to just leave it alone and let security agencies deal with it. But we know that businesses in the United Kingdom (by the way, I had a meeting with our British colleagues in this same room), they want to work with us, they are working with us and intend to continue doing so. And we support this intent.”
“I think that Mrs May, despite her resignation, could not help but be concerned that these spy scandals made our relations reach a deadlock so we could not develop our ties normally and support business people, who are doing what? They do not only earn money, this is what is on the outside. They create jobs and added value, plus they provide revenue at all levels of the tax system of their countries. This is a serious and multifaceted job, with the same risks you mentioned, including risks related to business operations. And if we add an unpredictable political situation, they will not be able to work at all. I think that both Russia and the United Kingdom are interested in fully restoring our relations. At least I hope that a few preliminary steps will be made. I think it would be easier for Mrs May, maybe, because she is leaving and is free to do what she thinks is right, important and necessary and not to bother about some domestic political consequences.”
Putin believed that through the Financial Times he was appealing to the business lobbies in London to push back against the war faction in Whitehall. The appeal was in vain.
In parallel, in an elaborately staged dialogue with the US filmmaker Oliver Stone, Putin allowed some of the truth to slip out. “What has happened to Skripal? Where is he?” Stone asked.
President Putin with Oliver Stone at the Kremlin. The interview was recorded on June 19, 2019; it was delayed in release for a month until July 19, 2019.
“Vladimir Putin: I have no idea. He is a spy, after all. He is always in hiding.”
“Oliver Stone: They say he was going to come back to Russia. He had some information.”
“Vladimir Putin: Yes, I have been told that he wants to make a written request to come back.”
“Oliver Stone: He knew still and he wanted to come back. He had information that he could give to the world press here in Russia.”
“Vladimir Putin: I doubt it. He has broken the ranks already. What kind of information can he possess?”
“Oliver Stone: Who poisoned him? They say English secret services did not want Sergei Skripal to come back to Russia?”
“Vladimir Putin: To be honest, I do not quite believe this. I do not believe this is the case.”
“Oliver Stone: Makes sense. You do not agree with me?”
“Vladimir Putin: If they had wanted to poison him, they would have done so.”
“Oliver Stone: Ok, that makes sense. I don’t know. Who did then?”
“Vladimir Putin: After all, this is not a hard thing to do in today’s world. In fact, a fraction of a milligram would have been enough to do the job. And if they had him in their hands, there was nothing complicated about it. No, this does not make sense. Maybe they just wanted to provoke a scandal.”
“Oliver Stone: I think it is more complicated. You know, you think I am much too much of a conspiracy guy.”
“Vladimir Putin: I do not believe this.”
In the Kremlin record of Putin’s references to the Skripal affair, these remarks of mid-2019 were the final word from the president. Putin and Stone were telling the truth of what had happened, and why.
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