What is Novichok? Justice for Salisbury Novichok victims is 'unlikely' says Theresa May

Justice for anyone impacted by the Salisbury Novichok incident is "highly unlikely to happen", according to former prime minister Theresa May.

She feels the next independent investigation into Dawn Sturgess's death would "provide some comfort" to her family, who lost her life in 2018 after coming into contact with the Russian nerve toxin.

In an interview after a BBC podcast about the Salisbury poisonings, Baroness May discussed the investigation, where she said: “I would hope by the end of it the family and friends of Dawn Sturgess feel it has got to the truth.

“Closure to all the people affected would only finally come with justice, and that justice is highly unlikely to happen.”

Mother-of-three from Wiltshire, Ms Sturgess, 44, passed away in July 2018 following her ingestion of the chemical weapon – disguised as a high-end perfume.

It is thought Russian agents, who are suspected by the police of having targeted Salisbury-based former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in March 2018, threw away the bottle.

The prime minister at the time, Baroness May, expressed her "deep sadness" over Ms Sturgess's passing.

However, she claimed that the number of dead "could have been so many more" and charged the Russians with "utter recklessness" in light of the amount of Novichok found.

"You felt they just didn't care about anything" she remarked to the BBC's Crime Next Door: Salisbury Poisoning podcast.

The Russian government has consistently denied any responsibility for the event.

But what exactly is Novichok and what effects does it have when administered? Here's the answers.

What is Novichok?

Novichok is the name of a series of highly toxic nerve agents, believed to be some of the deadliest ever made.

They were developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, and its name is Russian for “newcomer”.

Novichok agents are believed to be five to 10 times more lethal than the more commonly known VX and sarin poison gases.

They are designed to be undetectable by any standard chemical security tests.

US chemical weapons expert Amy Smithson said Novichok was made with agrochemicals so that offensive weapons production could more readily be hidden within a legitimate commercial industry.

Russian Spy Sergei Skripal: Salisbury Nerve Agent Incident

How does it work?

The chemical “causes a slowing of the heart and restriction of the airways, leading to death by asphyxiation,” said Professor Gary Stephens, a pharmacology expert at the University of Reading.

“One of the main reasons these agents are developed is because their component parts are not on the banned list.”

Is there an antidote?

Anyone exposed to Novichok must be immediately connected to a life-support machine, while their clothes are taken off and their body washed.

Various potentially lifesaving antidotes do exist, including atropine, pralidoxime and diazepam.

However, even if an effective antidote is used, there is still a strong chance of life-changing damage to the body.

What happened in the attack on the Skripals?

On March 4, 2018, police raced to reports the Skripals were unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury, finding them in an “extremely serious condition”.

The deadly military-grade nerve agent had been smeared on the door-handle of Mr Skripal’s home in the city.

Russian men Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, who operated under the false names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, stand accused of carrying out the attack. Chepiga was a top colonel in the GRU, Russia’s military.

The Skripals and the first police officer on scene were rushed to hospital fighting for their lives but later recovered.

In June that year in Amesbury, eight miles from Salisbury, Ms Sturgess and Charlie Rowley fell critically ill after handling a perfume bottle believed to have been used to transport the chemical weapon.

Ms Sturgess, 44, never recovered and died a month later, while Mr Rowley, 49, has said he continues to suffer from the long-term effects of exposure to the nerve agent.

Mrs May, the then-prime minister, openly blamed the Russian state for the attack on ex-spy Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.

"We will not tolerate such a brazen attempt to murder civilians on our soil,” she told MPs in the Commons.

Her words triggered an international spat in which both countries expelled the other’s diplomats from its shores, while the US and many of Britain’s other allies followed suit.

How did they get rid of Novichok?

Group captain Jason Davies, 52, of the Royal Air Force, was presented with an OBE by the Prince of Wales in December 2019 for his efforts to decontaminate Salisbury in the aftermath of the attack.

As the commanding officer of the Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Task Force, Mr Davies, 52, was responsible for ensuring the removal of the deadly nerve agent.

“It was like trying to find invisible ink. You can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you don’t know where it is," he said.

“You have to go on statistics and laboratory testing and sampling. You add all of that together and you can start to work it out.”

He added: “We knew there was one ground-zero – the home Sergei Skripal visited with Yulia at the time.

“When there was a fatality in Amesbury – Dawn Sturgess, this was really quite pivotal. It meant the contamination spread was far wider than we thought. This was a new ball game.

“It really hits home the risk to life for the guys who had been exposed on a daily basis. The risk to my personnel hit home.”

What has Russia said about Novichok?

Russia denies producing or researching nerve agents known as Novichok.

Russia was once believed to possess thousands of tonnes of weaponised Novichok varieties and their precursors, according to a 2014 report by the US-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, a non-partisan group working to reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

Along with the United States, Russia once ran one of the largest chemical weapons programmes in the world. It completed the destruction of a stockpile declared to the OPCW in 2019. The United States is in the final stages of destroying its own stockpile.

The weaponisation of any chemical is banned under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, of which Moscow is a signatory.

What happened to Alexei Navalny?

Mr Navalny, a politician and corruption investigator who was one of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia on August 20, 2020 and was taken to hospital in the Siberian city Omsk after the plane made an emergency landing.

He was transferred two days later to Berlin’s Charite hospital, where doctors said initial tests indicated Mr Navalny had been poisoned. Mr Navalny said Mr Putin was the one who poisoned him, and the Federal Security Service operatives were found to have been involved in the inquiry.

Mr Navalny was discharged a month later.

When Mr Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021, he was arrested immediately on suspicion of breaking his parole while receiving medical attention in Germany.

The following month, Mr Navalny's suspended sentence was changed to a term of more than two-and-a-half years in prison, and his organisations were subsequently shut down and he was labelled as extremist.

Following a fresh trial that Amnesty International called a fraud, Mr Navalny was convicted guilty of embezzlement and contempt of court in March 2022 and given a further nine years in prison.

Mr Navalny was later moved to a maximum-security jail after his appeal was denied. He was given a further 19-year term in August 2023 due to charges of extremism.

He vanished from prison in December 2023 and was absent for about three weeks. Mr Navalny reappeared in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, in an Arctic Circle corrective colony. The Federal Penitentiary Service declared on February 16, 2024, that Mr Navalny had passed away while in person after going for a walk and feeling ill that morning.