The scientist who developed Novichok, the military-grade nerve agent he later accused Moscow of abusing for “state-level” hits, has been found dead.
Vladimir Uglev died Oct. 26 at the age of 80, the independent Russian outlet The Insider reported Tuesday, stressing that a cause of death had not been given nor a reason for the delay in it being announced.
The scientist helped develop some of the earliest Novichok agents while working in Soviet Union labs between 1975 and 1990.
He later became an outspoken critic after it was found to have been used against key Kremlin critics, most famously Alexei Navalny, the popular, outspoken dissident who later died in a brutal Russian prison.
When the nerve agent was used in 2018 to poison double spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in the UK, Uglev called it a “state-level hit” orchestrated by Moscow.
“These are not the first victims on my conscience,” he told the BBC in April 2018, one month after the Skripals were found unconscious on a park bench, and before it was known they would survive.
“If I thought about it, I could probably count a dozen people who’ve been poisoned by our substances, in different circumstances, for example, at the military training ground.”
Novichok, which is up to eight times more powerful than VX gas, was also used to poison Navalny when he was Russia’s opposition leader in August 2020.
He fell severely ill while on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow – before being put in an induced coma and airlifted to a hospital in Berlin, Germany.
German lab technicians confirmed Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok. He miraculously pulled through, and defiantly returned to Russia — where he was thrown in a brutal Arctic penal colony, where he died in August 2024.
His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, blamed President Putin — and Novichok.
“Vladimir Putin killed my husband,” she said at the time.
Uglev said he almost became a victim himself, albeit it from accidentally splashing himself with it in a lab
“You could say the Skripals and I are baptized by the same Novichok,” he said. “It was my substance,” he said.
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