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It is seven in the morning on the east coast of the United States this Thursday, Wil Mirsajanov is sitting in a flowered armchair in his living room and does not want to keep silent about what happened in distant Siberia. He followed everything closely, the symptoms that Alexej Navalny showed after his poisoning, everything that could be learned about the clinical findings and his treatment in Omsk and now in the Berlin Charité.
“I am very disappointed,” says the 85-year-old chemist over Skype from his living room. He has been battling the chemical nerve agent Novitschok for 30 years and has campaigned for it to be placed on the list of banned substances under the Chemical Weapons Convention, he says. “And now it is being used again to remove a critic from the Kremlin.”
An early whistleblower
Mirsayanov knows more about Novichok than most people. He was head of counterintelligence at the Moscow Institute responsible for the Novichok program. The nerve agents were produced in a top secret chemical weapons program codenamed “Tome” under the institute’s aegis, but not in the capital. That happened in a restricted military area cordoned off in the small town of Schichany on the Volga, near the border with Kazakhstan.
