Vladimir Uglev, a Russian chemist who during the Cold War developed a class of highly deadly nerve agents called Novichok, then turned against the Russian government when it was used against dissidents including Alexei A. Navalny, died on Oct. 25. He was 80.
His son Alexandr confirmed the death, in a hospital, from complications of a heart attack.
Mr. Uglev began working on Novichok during the 1970s, when he and other military chemists were stationed at a secret location deep inside the country. They designed Novichok (the name means “newcomer” in Russian) to be 10 times deadlier than existing weapons like VX and sarin.
It takes just a trace amount to cause a target’s nervous system to go haywire by inhibiting an enzyme that governs muscle control. Involuntary contraction of the skeletal muscles, in particular, quickly results in heart failure or asphyxiation.
The Soviet Union never used Novichok in combat, and it was believed that all stocks of the weapon had been destroyed in the 1990s.
But in March 2018, a former Russian military intelligence officer named Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, collapsed on a park bench in Salisbury, Britain, from what doctors concluded was contact with a Novichok variant called A-234.
Mr. Skripal had spied for Britain in the 1990s and 2000s and was convicted of treason in 2006. Four years later, he was allowed to move to Britain with his daughter through a prisoner swap.
The Skripals survived, and the Russian government denied any involvement. Mr. Uglev was not convinced and said the chemical analysis was indisputable.
“I am 99 percent sure it was A-234 — I know it like a mother knows her child,” he told The Independent in 2018.
“This was a state-level hit,” he added.
The chemical weapon went on to demonstrate its grim effectiveness.
Nick Bailey, a police detective responding to the scene, fell ill with the same symptoms. He recovered, but four months later two people in nearby Amesbury, Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley, fell ill after touching a perfume bottle believed to have been used to transport the agent.
Both were hospitalized. Ms. Sturgess died, and Mr. Rowley recovered.
Then, in 2020, Mr. Navalny fell ill on a flight to Moscow from the Russian city of Tomsk. Once again, traces of Novichok were found on a bottle in his hotel room in Tomsk. He was flown to Germany, where he recovered.
Mr. Navalny was later arrested and sentenced to prison in western Siberia, where he died under suspicious circumstances in 2024. An analysis by five European countries found that he was likely poisoned by a toxin found in a South American frog.
Once again, Mr. Uglev placed the blame squarely on the Russian government.
“The attack on Alexei Navalny could have only been committed by a powerful group in Kremlin or intelligence circles and with the blessing of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2020.
Vladimir Ivanovich Uglev was born on Sept. 20, 1946, in Kirovsk, a mining settlement in northwestern Russia, above the Arctic Circle, where his parents had been sent as punishment during World War II. His father, Ivan, was a mining technician, and his mother, Margarita (Shchekoldina) Ugleva, operated a coil winder.
He studied chemistry at the Dmitry Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology in Moscow. After completing his doctorate in 1975, he went to work for the Soviet Defense Ministry in its top-secret chemical weapons program.
Over the next decade and a half, he helped lead research into next-generation nerve agents that were more lethal, more durable and harder to detect than their predecessors.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Uglev and other scientists came forward about their work, in the hope of pressuring the Soviet successor states to destroy their stockpiles.
Mr. Uglev was never charged, but he lost his top-secret clearance and left government. He later settled in Asana, where the moderate temperatures were better for his wife’s health, he said.
There he worked for a paint company before retiring about three years ago.
Along with his son, his is survived by his wife, Taisa Petrovna Ugleva, another son, Dmitriy; and two granddaughters.
Russia and the rest of the former Soviet states ratified the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, which prohibited development or maintenance of nerve agents.
Still, Mr. Uglev said he was unsurprised to see Novichok deployed against the Skripals. The ruthless Soviet secret police, known as the Cheka, had gone through many name evolutions over the decades, he said, but its instincts remained the same.
“Ultimately, I can only say one thing: the Cheka, since 1917, has been an organization that never forgives anyone,” he told Radio France International in 2018. “That’s its essence. It’s the Cheka, and then there are the names: OGPU, NKVD, MVD, KGB, FSB — they just have different names, but the essence is the same.”
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