Polonium, chloropicrin, epibatidine, Novichok. All lethal specialties “made in Russia,” even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and despite the CWC, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, signed in 1993. Moscow, of course, denies producing prohibited substances. However, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Svoboda have uncovered sites dedicated to the research and production of toxic gases and deadly poisons on behalf of the Kremlin.
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IN THE WAKE OF STALIN
At the top of the structure, in the city of Sergiev Posad, near the capital, is Vladimir Maksimov, formerly head of the Russian military unit 44026, the Virology Center of the Microbiology Institute of the Ministry of Defense, from 1999 to 2006 and then an official of the 48th Central Research Institute of the Russian Ministry of Defense, included for six years on the U.S. blacklist for having resumed and revived experiments started on Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea, in present-day independent Uzbekistan, by Stalin on infectious animal diseases, studying their application on humans.
Now, officially the military scientist works at the Federal Medical-Biological Agency (FMBA), led by Veronika Skvortsova, and is dedicated to fighting exotic and lethal hemorrhagic fever viruses such as Ebola and Marburg. In 2005, he stated in an interview with the newspaper Trud that “contrary to what is sometimes attributed to us, we are not engaged in ‘spreading death.’ Our task is exactly the opposite: to be able to fight it.” Since 2024, FMBA supervision has been transferred directly from the Russian government to Putin, a move described in parliament as the “right decision” that “would help resolve matters of a confidential nature,” reports Rfe/Rl. They deal with responses to natural disasters, radioactive incidents, catastrophes. In fact, it is thanks to them that the Sputnik vaccine against Covid-19 was discovered and prepared.
Behind the facade of remedies to defeat the pandemic, in reality, there would be the preparation of a conflict outside all rules, which reached its peak phase shortly before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In particular, on Lisiy Island, within the Vyshnevolotskoye nature reserve, in the Tver region northwest of Moscow, where since 2025 the Experimental Physiology Center has been established, which, according to Ukrainian intelligence, is “experimenting with dangerous viruses and other pathogens for the benefit of the armed forces.”
Like in a spy novel, the public and visible side would serve as a cover for secret operations, such as the one that led to the Novichok poisoning, a nerve agent, of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018 in Salisbury, United Kingdom. During the Soviet period, according to Milton Leitenberg, a researcher at the Center for International and Security Studies of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, placing the laboratory on an isolated piece of land in the center of a basin surrounded by water on all sides was a security measure — an additional protection measure for local residents in case a dangerous pathogen escaped.
THE HUMAN GUINEA PIGS
In a 2020 investigation on an updated version of Novichok, Systema, the investigative journalism unit of Rfe/Rl, discovered that a research institute in the Leningrad region, supervised by the FMBA, was producing several biological supplements developed by a scientific center called Signal. It was later confirmed that Signal had worked with epibatidine, a poison derived from an Ecuadorian frog suspected to have been used to poison political dissident Sergei Navalny in the Arctic prison where he suddenly died in February 2024. To warn internal and external enemies.
