Should the UK be ready for chemical warfare with Moscow?

0:02Gareth:Sky News, the full story first.

0:09Gareth:Coming up on The Daily with me, Gareth Barlow, another Putin critic has been poisoned and Russia has also been using toxic gas on the battlefield. So, should the UK be ready for chemical warfare with Russia?

0:26Gareth:Death by frog isn't the most normal way to go, but then again Alexei Navalny isn't your average murder victim. He was a former Russian opposition leader and a huge critic of the Russian president Vladimir Putin.

0:42Gareth:It all seems that unfortunately, perhaps unsurprisingly, Putin is developing new programs of chemical weapons, which are forbidden, and of course they deny everything which is typical of the Kremlin. This all comes on the second anniversary of the confirmation of Alexei Navalny's death in a prison cell in Siberia. And this week, the UK Foreign Secretary said this.

1:02Hamish de Bretton-Gordon:We have together found the evidence of this lethal toxin that was found in Alexei Navalny's body at the time he died. They wanted to silence him because he was a critic of their regime.

1:16Gareth:The poisoning of another Kremlin critic won't come as a surprise to people in the UK. you surely will remember the Salisbury poisonings, for example. Very good evening from Salisbury, where there's a major military operation underway this evening. But the fact that the toxin came from an Ecuadorian dart frog is something akin to a James Bond film. This is what we're dealing with,

1:35Michael Clarke:a country that murders people, and it murders them in these exotic ways

1:41Gareth:that they want us to know it was them. We're going to be talking to Sky's defence analyst, Michael Clarke, about whether NATO needs to up its game when it comes to chemical warfare. But first, let's bring in Hamish to Bretton Gordon, former head of the British Army's Chemical Weapons Unit. The Russians and poisoning people is not an unusual situation. It's happened before. We've seen it in our own Fair Isle. But what we haven't really seen, it appears, is dart frog poison. So what exactly went on and how exactly does it work?

2:10Hamish de Bretton-Gordon:First of all, nobody is particularly surprised that Navalny has been murdered by the Russian state. And I suppose nobody's particularly surprised that it's been done in a rather strange way using a toxic chemical extracted from an Ecuadorian tree frog. This is the modus operandi of the Russian security services. I'm talking to you from Salisbury, where Sergei Skripal had an attempted assassination on him using the deadly nerve agent Novichok. So this is the sort of thing that the Russian Secret Service do. The Russians want us to absolutely know that they're behind it because extracting the toxin out of a frog and using it to murder people is actually quite a complex and difficult operation to do.

3:01Hamish de Bretton-Gordon:Administering it to Navalny would have been relatively straightforward.

3:05Gareth:Russia, though, is an Arctic tundra, northern Caucasus, European, Asian continent. It is not South America with tree frogs. How on earth have they gone about this?

3:19Hamish de Bretton-Gordon:Well, Russia also, no doubt, has agents from the FSB and the GRU all over the world. So I should think it would have been no great challenge for people out of the Russian embassy in Quito in Ecuador or perhaps in Colombia to go and find these frogs. Once they had them, you know, extracting the poison is a technical activity that is well within the compass of the CBRN, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear type weapons. And the Russians, they have an active chemical weapons program around Novichok, but also they're using chemical weapons on an industrial scale in Ukraine and have been doing so for about the last two years.

4:07Hamish de Bretton-Gordon:A lot less toxic than the toxin being used that was used to murder Navalny. But it is, again, part of the way that not only the Russian Secret Service operate, but also the Russian army in Ukraine.

4:20Gareth:Just with regards to Navalny, do we have any idea as to how this dart frog poison would have affected him? Obviously he died, but what is the mechanism of something like this?

4:29Hamish de Bretton-Gordon:It affects the major organs of your body. I understand it particularly affects your breathing and other major organs, and he would have probably died relatively quickly from it. What is surprising is that presumably the British Secret Service managed to get samples from Navalny's body and then have them analysed, which sort of leads one back to maybe the Russian state wanted the world to know that they'd done this. Because otherwise you would sort of come to the conclusion that the Russian Secret Service is inept to allow this sort of thing to happen.

5:09Gareth:So you've got Alexei Navalny killed with dart frog poisoning. You've got Sergei Skripal targeted with Novichok, a nerve agent. If you go back years before that, Alexander Litvinenko and Polonium-210. It's a common way for the Kremlin and its power structure to get rid of its foes is to poison them or certainly administer a noxious substance to them. Why go about it this way?

5:34Hamish de Bretton-Gordon:Well, you go back to Georgi Markov, who was murdered on Waterloo Bridge in 1976 with ricin, another biological toxin. I think this is just part of the way that the Russian Secret Service operates. As soon as you mention chemical or biological weapons, it creates an added fear amongst people. The psychological impact is usually much more than the physical. That is the way that the Russians like to operate, with absolute fear. and anybody who opposes them, it's not going to be a simple shot to the head. It's going to be some dreadful chemical or biological weapon that's going to destroy. The Russian state want people to know that anybody who opposes them will meet a really nasty end.

6:19Gareth:And there's also something psychological about the administering of it, isn't it? Because that case on Waterloo Bridge, am I right in remembering that that was administered via the end of an umbrella, a dart in the end of an umbrella to the back of the leg?

6:30Hamish de Bretton-Gordon:you're absolutely right it was a tiny little uh ball bearing it was full of ricin which is a a deadly toxin that is derived from caster beans bizarrely enough and a similar way to um lipo being poisoned with polonium which is a very very poisonous nuclear isotope and very very rare these are only the the sort of activities of a state-run organization you can't you know if you wanted to go out and buy polonium you probably could buy it but it would cost you millions and millions of dollars a drop as it were it is very much in the sort of shadows and the sort of james bond type activity that we sort of think is just on the tv screens but actually the russian secret service seem to revel in trying to give the impression that that's the sort of world that they're in but it's so very serious because they do go and murder an awful lot of people who oppose them

7:26Gareth:What does this most latest case tell us about where Russia is at and maybe developing or exploring new substances such as this?

7:36Hamish de Bretton-Gordon:Well, I think the most important thing that people in the West need to understand is that the Russians have an extant chemical weapons program. It's a lot cheaper than having tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons. They declared in November 2017 that they'd stopped their chemical weapons program. And a few months later, of course, Sergo Skripal was poisoned with Novichok. We've then seen quite a lot of some very credible evidence that perhaps the Russians have been working on a biological weapons programme, looking to weaponise Ebola into some sort of weapon.

8:09Gareth:That was Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, former head of the British Army's Chemical Weapons Unit, and this is Michael Clarke, our very own defence and security analyst.

8:17Michael Clarke:This was clearly designed as an announcement to coincide with the Munich Security Conference, with the second anniversary of Navalny's death, with Yulia Navalneya, Navalny's wife, was at Munich, and she gave a very affecting session talking about him and talking about the death and talking about this with Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary. And she was very clear that this is Russian murder. And in a way, it was designed to put the emphasis on understanding the threat that Russia poses. It's an existential threat, existential in the sense that not a threat to our existence. it's an existential threat because it's always there.

8:56Michael Clarke:It is in the nature of European politics for the foreseeable future that Russia is a war country, a war economy, a war leader that is designed, is determined to make war on the rest of us one way or another. That was the feeling of the conference. It was also designed, I think, to make a point to the United States. It was designed to show them, you know, this is what we're dealing with, a country that murders people and it murders them in these exotic ways that they want us to know it was them. The Russians traditionally all use poison and they wanted us to know it was them and they deny it. Of course they do, but they deny it in the way that a mafia boss denies it.

9:35Michael Clarke:You know, they deny it with a wink to show that they mean it and that they can do it to other

9:39Gareth:people as well. What does actually legitimately change as a result of going public with this information. It increases the charge sheet.

9:47Michael Clarke:And by and large, you know, when British intelligence says things in the world, the rest of the world tends to believe it. And that's not the case for many intelligence organizations. And even though the Russians keep denying it, we say, look, the charge sheet keeps lengthening. And one of the reasons now to refer all of this material on Navalny to the OPCW, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which sits in The Hague, it's the, it's, if you like, the court that looks after the Chemical Weapons Treaty of 1997. And the OPCW will then record all of this, will do their own independent analysis of it.

10:21Michael Clarke:And there it is. It is sitting in the international organisation that is supposed to record all breaches of the Chemical Weapons Treaty. Because the Chemical Weapons Treaty, 1997, prohibits the development, the stockpiling, the transfer or the use of any chemical weapons.

10:37Gareth:Is there an argument that it also does in the Kremlin's PR for them, one could say?

10:41Michael Clarke:That's undoubtedly true. The Kremlin wants people to know that though they deny it, they actually, they bump people off. They murder people in any country in the world. If you betray us, we will go after you for the rest of your life. And that's meant to be a deterrent, of course. But of course, it just builds up this sense that Putin, whatever else he is, he's an international gangster.

11:01Gareth:Let's just take a moment to consider the exact words of the Kremlin's reaction. It says, we've become accustomed to the feeble-mindedness of Western fabricators. This is not a search for justice, but a mockery of the dead. It's pointed in its use of language.

11:15Michael Clarke:They always say this. I mean, and they pick out the Brits in particular in Russian media. They say, oh, you know, the Brits are neurotic about us. They blame us for everything. And there is, I mean, Russian humour is actually quite close to British humour. There's a lot of irony in it. And so they make jokes about, oh, the weather's bad. the Brits will blame us for all the bad weather they're having in the United Kingdom. So they laugh about it, but they've created that narrative that of all of their enemies, all of their adversaries in Europe, the Brits are the most erstwhile, the most consistent, and in a way the most effective of their European enemies.

11:49Gareth:There are murders, international murders being taking place, but at the same time, people do survive. Is there an argument that we maybe overstate the efficacy of the FSB, the Russian security services. They're not that good at it.

12:01Michael Clarke:I mean, they didn't get Skripal and his daughter, but they clearly intended to, instead of which, you know, they killed somebody else and rendered her boyfriend, you know, very, very ill. And what they did, they leave a trail of evidence behind them. And the Libyanenko attacks in 2006 left a trail of radioactive traces in all the places that they tried to get him before they managed it. And the carelessness with which they do it, and what the police would say, this is reckless, because they're not even affecting their target. They're affecting lots of other people. But the recklessness is also a sign of a degree of incompetence.

12:36Michael Clarke:But they're competent enough to succeed quite often. They don't always succeed. They've missed a few people who then live in fear for the rest of their lives. So in a way, they've succeeded in making their point that they're after them and that for the rest of their life, they must look over their shoulders.

12:52Gareth:Russia is undertaking chemical weapons activities in public, in the street at times. It's also doing so openly on the battlefield against Ukraine. What is the state of play there?

13:02Michael Clarke:The Russians are using chemical agents, particularly CS gas. You know, interestingly, CS gas is a band on the battlefield. It's not banned in the streets. And CS gas has the effect of forcing people out into the open where they can be killed in different ways. And so CS gas has been banned as a battlefield weapon for a long time. And the Russians are known to be using that, and have been known to be using it in pretty extensive ways. There's some accusations of nerve agents, but they're not very well supported by evidence. There's bits and pieces of evidence, lots of accusations. But what is supported by a lot of evidence is chemical, the use of chemical weapons.

13:39Gareth:Does the UK, does NATO need to be more ready than it is for chemical warfare against Russia, or with Russia, or because of Russia?

13:46Michael Clarke:I think we have to anticipate that in another all-out war, and we don't really know what we mean when we say that, and I don't want to be alarmist when I say that, but in another, as it were, significant military operation, say against Russia, we have to be prepared for the possibility of chemical use. and you know we don't stock chemical weapons any chemical weapons we have are for very small amounts for research so that we understand what the antidotes can be and we do quite a lot in our own chemical weapons research establishment but they are tiny amounts for literally you know developing antidotes but we don't stock chemical weapons so you can't deter chemical weapons with other chemical weapons so we have to have ways of protecting troops and possibly civilians against chemical but mainly troops on the front line as things stand and then you have to have other sorts of deterrent to be able to say you know if chemical weapons were used we would do this this and this in response and that would be our that's our answer to a deterrent response what you don't want to do is to go to nuclear is to say well our you know our nuclear weapons are our deterrent against your use of chemical because that gets very dangerous indeed but you have to have other things that you think would put at risk elements that the opposition would not want to have put at risk as your deterrent against the use of chemical weapons.

15:07Gareth:Michael, thank you so much. Hamish, before that, thanks to him too. Thanks to you for listening. That's all for today. The Daily is back again tomorrow.