Wonder if someone slipped him a little Novichok?
The German government says Russia’s opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, has been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.
The most prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin was airlifted to Berlin for treatment after falling ill during a flight in Russia’s Siberia region last month. He has been in a coma since.
The name Novichok last made news in 2018, when Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were attacked in the city of Salisbury in the UK.
Russia has denied any role in Mr Navalny’s predicament - or the Skripals’ poisoning.
So what do we know about this group of military-grade nerve agents?
They were developed in the Soviet Union
The name Novichok means “newcomer” in Russian, and applies to a group of advanced nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s.
They were known as fourth-generation chemical weapons and were developed under a Soviet programme codenamed Foliant.
Novichok’s existence was revealed by chemist Dr Vil Mirzayanov in the 1990s, via Russian media. He later defected to the US, where he published the chemical formula in his book, State Secrets.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43377698