122-537: Novichok ( Russian : Новичо́к , lit. 'newcomer, novice, newbie') is a family of nerve agents , some of which are binary chemical weapons . The agents were developed at the GosNIIOKhT state chemical research institute by the Soviet Union and Russia between 1971 and 1993. Some Novichok agents are solids at standard temperature and pressure , while others are liquids . Dispersal of solid form agents
244-649: A constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language. According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%. Starting in 2019, instruction in Russian will be gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, and in general instruction in Latvian public high schools. On 29 September 2022, Saeima passed in
366-510: A new education law which requires all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian, with provisions while allow indigenous languages and languages of national minorities to be used alongside the national language. The law faced criticism from officials in Russia and Hungary. The 2019 Law of Ukraine "On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language" gives priority to
488-443: A 2018 Reuters report. The chemical formula was given to Western NATO countries, who synthesized it, then used small amounts to test protective equipment, detection of it, and antidotes to it. Novichok was referred to in a patent filed in 2008 for an organophosphorus poisoning treatment. The University of Maryland, Baltimore research was funded in part by the U.S. Army . Professor Leonid Rink , who said he had participated in
610-753: A Moscow laboratory in May 1987. He was critically injured and took ten days to recover consciousness after the incident. He lost the ability to walk and was treated at a secret clinic in Leningrad for three months afterwards. The agent caused permanent harm, with effects that included "chronic weakness in his arms, a toxic hepatitis that gave rise to cirrhosis of the liver , epilepsy, spells of severe depression, and an inability to read or concentrate that left him totally disabled and unable to work." He never recovered and, after five years of deteriorating health, died in July 1992. The use of
732-525: A Soviet program codenamed Foliant . Five Novichok variants are believed to have been adapted for military use. The most versatile is A-232 (Novichok-5). Novichok agents have never been used on the battlefield. The UK government determined that a Novichok agent was used in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England in March 2018. It was unanimously confirmed by four laboratories around
854-412: A chemical reaction with Novichok type nerve agent, the modified nonapeptide is be detected, and its exact (high resolution) mass (along with the mass of the secondary ion produced during collision induced dissociation) allows unambiguous identification of the fact of poisoning and the exact structure of the poison. Thus, the example at Figure A shows the masses of the primary and secondary ions obtained from
976-568: A discontinued American program to develop a nerve agent code named " GJ ", that was fed by a double agent to the Soviets as part of Operation Shocker . Stephanie Fitzpatrick, an American geopolitical consultant, has claimed that the Chemical Research Institute in Nukus , Soviet Uzbekistan , produced Novichok agents, and The New York Times has reported that U.S. officials said the site was
1098-416: A family of compounds whereas Western scientists instantiate a particular salt. Mirzyanov makes clear that a large number of compounds were made, and many of the less potent derivatives were reported in the open literature as new organophosphate insecticides, so that the secret chemical weapons program could be disguised as legitimate pesticide research. According to chemical weapons expert Jonathan Tucker ,
1220-436: A fast-acting peripheral anticholinergic drug such as atropine can block the receptors where acetylcholine acts to prevent poisoning (as in the treatment for poisoning by other acetylcholinesterase inhibitors). Atropine, however, is difficult to administer safely, because its effective dose for nerve agent poisoning is close to the dose at which patients suffer severe side effects, such as changes in heart rate and thickening of
1342-440: A formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant, the maximal structure can be described as follows: (C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) Lev Alexandrovich Fyodorov Lev Alexandrovich Fyodorov (sometimes Fedorov ; Russian Лев Александрович Фёдоров; 10 June 1936, Moscow ,- 12 August 2017) was a Russian chemist . He was employed at the V. I. Vernadskiy Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry of
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#17330853874131464-512: A group that worked on the development of the Novichok agents, at least one liquid form of Novichok is very stable with a slow evaporation rate and can remain potent for possibly up to 50 years. Insufficient research has been conducted to fully understand its persistence in various situations in the environment. As nerve agents, the Novichok agents belong to the class of organophosphate acetylcholinesterase inhibitors . These chemical compounds inhibit
1586-612: A hospital at the age of 46. The poison was believed to have been applied to Kivelidi's office phone in Moscow. His secretary Zara Ismailova also developed symptoms one month later and then died a day later in a hospital at the age of 35. Kivelidi was the head of the Russian Business Round Table, and had close ties to Viktor Chernomyrdin , who was at that time Prime Minister of Russia . Russian opposition –linked historians Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky speculated that
1708-724: A known V-series nerve agent, VR , while the later Novichok agents are the binary forms of compounds such as A-232 and A-234 . According to a classified (secret) report by the US Army National Ground Intelligence Center in Military Intelligence Digest dated 24 January 1997, agent designated A-232 and its ethyl analogue A-234 developed under the Foliant programme "are as toxic as VX, as resistant to treatment as soman, and more difficult to detect and easier to manufacture than VX". The binary versions of
1830-479: A language that "belongs to the European cultural space". The financing of Russian-language content by the state will cease, which the concept says create a "unified information space". However, one inevitable consequence would be the closure of public media broadcasts in Russian on LTV and Latvian Radio, as well as the closure of LSM's Russian-language service. In Lithuania , Russian has no official or legal status, but
1952-572: A lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic , Turkic , Persian , Arabic , and Hebrew . According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California , Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. Feudal divisions and conflicts created obstacles between
2074-607: A minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Azerbaijan , Russian has no official status, but is a lingua franca of the country. 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Georgia , Russian has no official status, but it
2196-438: A number of nerve agents, including soman and the Novichok agents. An unexpected synergistic interaction was seen to occur between galantamine (given between five hours before to thirty minutes after exposure) and atropine in an amount of 6 mg/kg or higher. Increasing the dose of galantamine from 5 to 8 mg/kg decreased the dose of atropine needed to protect experimental animals from the toxicity of soman in dosages 1.5 times
2318-516: A qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society. In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, in
2440-577: A university in Tehran synthesised five of the seven Novichok agents for analysis and produced detailed mass spectroscopy data which was added to the OPCW's Central Analytical Database. Previously, there had been no detailed descriptions of their spectral properties in peer-reviewed general scientific literature. A small amount of agent A-230 was also claimed to have been synthesised in the Czech Republic in 2017 for
2562-527: Is Belarusian, among ethnic Belarusians this share is 28.5%; the highest share of those who speak Belarusian at home is among ethnic Poles — 46.0%. In Estonia , Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population, according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook, and is officially considered a foreign language. School education in the Russian language is a very contentious point in Estonian politics, and in 2022,
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#17330853874132684-475: Is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan . The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population. Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group. In Tajikistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under
2806-401: Is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian , and a moderate degree of it in all modern Slavic languages, at least at the conversational level. Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound: Older letters of
2928-427: Is a modification of the procedure that was developed earlier for identification of sarin poisoning. This method capitalizes on the fact that poisoning by organic phosphonates occurs via phosphonylation of the hydroxy group of serine in the active site of cholinesterases, and that severe poisoning occurs when a major part of these enzymes are inactivated. The concentration of butyryl cholinesterase (HuBuChE) in human plasma
3050-544: Is a post-posed definite article -to , -ta , -te similar to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian. In the Southern Russian dialects , instances of unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (as occurs in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced [a] in such positions (e.g. несл и is pronounced [nʲaˈslʲi] , not [nʲɪsˈlʲi] ) – this
3172-485: Is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding , which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs are available offering this Unicode extension, which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards. The Russian language was first introduced to computing after the M-1 , and MESM models were produced in 1951. According to
3294-613: Is called yakanye ( яканье ). Consonants include a fricative /ɣ/ , a semivowel /w⁓u̯/ and /x⁓xv⁓xw/ , whereas the Standard and Northern dialects have the consonants /ɡ/ , /v/ , and final /l/ and /f/ , respectively. The morphology features a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the Standard and Northern dialects). During the Proto-Slavic (Common Slavic) times all Slavs spoke one mutually intelligible language or group of dialects. There
3416-563: Is more spoken than English. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City , Philadelphia , Boston , Los Angeles , Nashville , San Francisco , Seattle , Spokane , Toronto , Calgary , Baltimore , Miami , Portland , Chicago , Denver , and Cleveland . In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially
3538-530: Is normally about 80 nM. That makes it a good source of adducts that can be subjected to analysis. The procedure consists of three steps (see the Figure A). First, HuBuChE is obtained from the victim's plasma. Second, the enzyme is subjected to pepsin proteolysis. Third, the peptide mixture obtained is subjected to LC-MSMS analysis. If no poisoning took place, the peptide mixture contains a non-modified nonapeptide FGESAGAAS. However, cholinesterases are inactivated due to
3660-564: Is odd") – чу́дно ( chúdno – "this is marvellous"), молоде́ц ( molodéts – "well done!") – мо́лодец ( mólodets – "fine young man"), узна́ю ( uznáyu – "I shall learn it") – узнаю́ ( uznayú – "I recognize it"), отреза́ть ( otrezát – "to be cutting") – отре́зать ( otrézat – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like афе́ра ( aféra , "scandal, affair"), гу́ру ( gúru , "guru"), Гарси́я ( García ), Оле́ша ( Olésha ), Фе́рми ( Fermi ), and to show which
3782-405: Is particularly noted for his part in the publication of details regarding the discovery of Novichok nerve agents, and the subsequent court case against Mirzayanov. In 1967 Fyodorov received his candidate degree in chemistry and he subsequently defended his doctorate thesis in 1983. He has authored several monographs and articles in the field of physical chemistry and from 1983 his work focused on
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3904-402: Is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language. In China , Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang and
4026-569: Is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin , Polish , Dutch , German, French, Italian, and English, and to
4148-576: Is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook. In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia, and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006. Around 1.5 million Israelis spoke Russian as of 2017. The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in
4270-517: Is the most spoken native language in Europe , the most spoken Slavic language , as well as the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia . It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers , and the world's ninth-most spoken language by total number of speakers . Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station , one of
4392-746: Is the native language of the Russians . It was the de facto and de jure official language of the former Soviet Union . Russian has remained an official language of the Russian Federation , Belarus , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , and Tajikistan , and is still commonly used as a lingua franca in Ukraine , Moldova , the Caucasus , Central Asia , and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel . Russian has over 258 million total speakers worldwide. It
4514-518: Is the stressed word in a sentence, for example Ты́ съел печенье? ( Tý syel pechenye? – "Was it you who ate the cookie?") – Ты съе́л печенье? ( Ty syél pechenye? – "Did you eat the cookie?) – Ты съел пече́нье? ( Ty syel pechénye? "Was it the cookie you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners. The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using
4636-452: Is thought possible if in ultrafine powder state. Russian scientists who developed the nerve agents claim they are the deadliest ever made, with some variants possibly five to eight times more potent than VX , and others up to ten times more potent than soman . Iran has also been associated with the production of such chemical agents. In the 21st century, Novichok agents came to public attention after they were used to poison opponents of
4758-461: The 2011 Lithuanian census , Russian was the native language for 7.2% of the population. In Moldova , Russian was considered to be the language of interethnic communication under a Soviet-era law. On 21 January 2021, the Constitutional Court of Moldova declared the law unconstitutional and deprived Russian of the status of the language of interethnic communication. 50% of the population
4880-966: The Apollo–Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975. In March 2013, Russian was found to be the second-most used language on websites after English. Russian was the language of 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian was used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su . Websites in former Soviet Union member states also used high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian
5002-448: The CWC , or be undetectable by treaty regime inspections. The most potent compounds from this family, Novichok-5 and Novichok-7, are supposedly around five to eight times more potent than VX . The "Novichok" designation refers to the binary form of the agent, with the final compound being referred to by its code number (e.g. A-232). The first Novichok series compound was in fact the binary form of
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5124-673: The Chemical Weapons Convention . According to Mirzayanov, the Russian Military Chemical Complex (MCC) was using defence conversion money received from the West for development of a chemical warfare facility. Mirzayanov made his disclosure out of environmental concerns. He was the head of a counter-intelligence department and performed measurements outside the chemical weapons facilities to make sure that foreign spies could not detect any traces of production. To his horror,
5246-413: The Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation. 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business. In Turkmenistan , Russian lost its status as the official lingua franca in 1996. Among 12% of the population who grew up in
5368-527: The Ukrainian language in more than 30 spheres of public life: in particular in public administration , media, education, science, culture, advertising, services . The law does not regulate private communication. A poll conducted in March 2022 by RATING in the territory controlled by Ukraine found that 83% of the respondents believe that Ukrainian should be the only state language of Ukraine. This opinion dominates in all macro-regions, age and language groups. On
5490-625: The United States Census , in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States. Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following: The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to
5612-508: The 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey, fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular former Warsaw Pact countries. In Armenia , Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as
5734-571: The A-232 agent, that it was more frostproof, and confirmed that a binary version has been developed from it. Uglev revealed more details in 2018, following the poisoning of the Skripals, stating that "several hundred" compounds were synthesised during the Foliant research but only four agents were weaponised (presumably the Novichok-5, −7, −8 and −9 mentioned by other sources): the first three were liquids and only
5856-422: The A-232 structure against the active site of the acetylcholinesterase enzyme. The model predicted a tight fit with high binding affinity and formation of a covalent bond to a serine residue in the active site, with a similar binding mode to established nerve agents such as sarin and soman. A procedure of retrospective detection of Novichok type poisons in victim's tissues has been proposed recently. This method
5978-465: The Belarusian society the Russian language prevails, so according to the 2019 census 6,718,557 people (71.4% of the total population) stated that they speak Russian at home, for ethnic Belarusians this share is 61.4%, for Russians — 97.2%, for Ukrainians — 89.0%, for Poles — 52.4%, and for Jews — 96.6%; 2,447,764 people (26.0% of the total population) stated that the language they usually speak at home
6100-504: The CWC "in one of the first major changes to the treaty since it was agreed in the 1990s" in response to the 2018 poisonings in the UK. Novichok agents were designed to achieve four objectives: Some of these agents are binary weapons , in which precursors for the nerve agents are mixed in a munition to produce the agent just prior to its use. The precursors are generally significantly less hazardous than
6222-613: The Center of Environmental Policy of Russia ("Chemical Weapons in Russia: History, Ecology, Politics" (1994) and "Undeclared Chemical War in Russia: Policy against Ecology" (1995)). Subsequently he dealt with related problems in environmental chemistry - pesticides, rocket fuel, biological weapons, etc. On October 15, 1993, at the first meeting of the Union "For Chemical Safety" (registered as
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#17330853874136344-519: The Great and developed from the Moscow ( Middle or Central Russian ) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution , the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. Russian peasants, the great majority of the population, continued to speak in their own dialects. However,
6466-578: The Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent ( знак ударения ) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress . For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к ( zamók – "lock") – за́мок ( zámok – "castle"), сто́ящий ( stóyashchy – "worthwhile") – стоя́щий ( stoyáshchy – "standing"), чудно́ ( chudnó – "this
6588-538: The LD50 (lethal dose in half the animals studied). There have been differing claims about the persistence of Novichok and binary precursors in the environment. One view is that it is not affected by normal weather conditions, and may not decompose as quickly as other organophosphates . However, Mirzayanov states that Novichok decomposes within four months. A Novichok agent was used in 1995 to poison Russian banker Ivan Kivelidi [ ru ] , who died three days later in
6710-515: The Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin America – 0.2 million, U.S., Canada , Australia, and New Zealand – 4.1 million speakers. Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by the number of speakers , after English, Mandarin, Hindi -Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese. Russian is one of the six official languages of
6832-448: The P=O replaced with P=S or P=Se), which is most commonly depicted as being a phosphoramidate or phosphonate , usually fluorinated (cf. monofluorophosphate ). The organic groups are subject to more variety; however, a common substituent is phosgene oxime or analogues thereof. This is a potent chemical weapon in its own right, specifically as a nettle agent , and would be expected to increase
6954-514: The Russian Academy of Sciences, and became a member of the New York Academy of Sciences. Fyodorov was a chemical warfare officer. After studying chemistry at Lomonosov University , he received his doctorate in 1967 and his habilitation in 1983. After the end of the Soviet era , he published papers on chemical and biological weapons and chemical security. Together with Vil Mirzayanov , he
7076-807: The Russian alphabet include ⟨ ѣ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ е ⟩ ( /je/ or /ʲe/ ); ⟨ і ⟩ and ⟨ ѵ ⟩ , which both merged to ⟨ и ⟩ ( /i/ ); ⟨ ѳ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ф ⟩ ( /f/ ); ⟨ ѫ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ у ⟩ ( /u/ ); ⟨ ѭ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ю ⟩ ( /ju/ or /ʲu/ ); and ⟨ ѧ ⟩ and ⟨ ѩ ⟩ , which later were graphically reshaped into ⟨ я ⟩ and merged phonetically to /ja/ or /ʲa/ . While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers ⟨ ъ ⟩ and ⟨ ь ⟩ originally indicated
7198-636: The Russian government, including the Skripals and two others in Amesbury, UK (2018), as well as Alexei Navalny (2020), but civil poisonings with this substance have been known since at least 1995. In November 2019, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which is the executive body for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), added the Novichok agents to "list of controlled substances" of
7320-458: The Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences, and for a while, prevented the emergence of a standardized national language. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the gradual re-emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for standardization came from
7442-454: The Soviet era can speak Russian, other generations of citizens that do not have any knowledge of Russian. Primary and secondary education by Russian is almost non-existent. In Uzbekistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication. It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the lingua franca of the country and the language of the elite. Russian
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#17330853874137564-566: The UK government said that a Novichok agent had been used in an attack in the English city of Salisbury on 4 March 2018 in an attempt to kill former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. British Prime Minister Theresa May said in Parliament: "Either this was a direct action by the Russian state against our country, or the Russian government lost control of its potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into
7686-557: The US, according to German media reports." The sample was analysed in Sweden. Small amounts of the Novichok nerve agent were subsequently produced in some NATO countries for test purposes. Mirzayanov provided the first description of these agents. Dispersed in an ultra-fine powder instead of a gas or a vapour, they have unique qualities. A binary agent was then created that would mimic the same properties but would either be manufactured using materials which are not controlled substances under
7808-460: The United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia, and in many former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics. In Belarus , Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian per the Constitution of Belarus . 77% of
7930-506: The agents reportedly use acetonitrile and an organic phosphate "that can be disguised as a pesticide precursor." The agent A-234 is also supposedly around five to eight times more potent than VX. The median lethal dose for inhaled A-234 has been estimated as 7 mg/m for two minute exposure (minute volume of 15 L, slight activity). The median lethal dose for inhaled A-230, likely the most toxic liquid Novichok, has been estimated as between 1.9 and 3 mg/m for two minute exposure. Thus
8052-550: The agents themselves, so this technique makes handling and transporting the munitions a great deal simpler. Additionally, precursors to the agents are usually much easier to stabilise than the agents themselves, so this technique also makes it possible to increase the shelf life of the agents. This has the disadvantage that careless preparation may produce a non-optimal agent. During the 1980s and 1990s, binary versions of several Soviet agents were developed and are designated as "Novichok" agents. Novichok agents were designed as part of
8174-435: The agents, stating: "No scientific research or development under the title Novichok were carried out." After the attack, 21 members of the emergency services and public were checked for possible exposure, and three were hospitalised. As of 12 March, one police officer remained in hospital. Five hundred members of the public were advised to decontaminate their possessions to prevent possible long-term exposure, and 180 members of
8296-581: The attack. On the next day, the UK expelled 23 Russian diplomats after the Russian government refused to meet the UK's deadline of midnight on 13 March 2018 to give an explanation for the use of the substance. Addressing the United Nations Security Council on 15 March, Vassily Nebenzia , the Russian envoy to the UN, responded to the British allegations by denying that Russia had ever produced or researched
8418-403: The broader sense of expanding the use of Russian alongside or in favour of other languages. The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language ( современный русский литературный язык – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose at the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter
8540-566: The bronchial secretions, which fill the lungs of someone suffering nerve agent poisoning so that suctioning of these secretions, and other advanced life support techniques, may be necessary in addition to administration of atropine to treat nerve agent poisoning. In the treatment of nerve agent poisoning, atropine is most often administered along with a Hagedorn oxime such as pralidoxime , obidoxime , TMB-4 , or HI-6 , which reactivates acetylcholinesterase which has been inactivated by phosphorylation by an organophosphorus nerve agent and relieves
8662-460: The country. There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus . See also Russian language in Israel . Russian is also spoken as a second language by a small number of people in Afghanistan . In Vietnam , Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English. The Russian language
8784-406: The creation of Novichok agents, confirmed that the structures leaked by Mirzayanov were the correct ones. Rink was himself convicted in Russia for illegally selling a Novichok agent used in 1995 to assassinate a banker, Ivan Kivelidi , and his secretary. David Wise , in his book Cassidy's Run , implies that the Soviet program may have been the unintended result of misleading information, involving
8906-412: The development of Novichok agents. However, Khutsishvili, who claimed that he was innocent, had not been detained at the time of the trial and freely left the country. He was only arrested in 2006 after he returned to Russia, believing that the ten-year old case was closed. Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky claimed that Russia's security services, which had access to the chemical agent, had framed Khutsishvili for
9028-526: The distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of the consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels . Stress , which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically , though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress – such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [ zamók , 'lock'] and за́мок [ zámok , 'castle']), or to indicate
9150-618: The environmental issues concerning dioxins . Fyodorov was the author of articles in Chemosphere (1993) ( Dioxin problem in Russian chemical industry , Ecological problems in Russia caused by dioxin emissions from chemical industry )> also articles in "Успехи химии" ( "Successes of Chemistry" ) (1990), and in the journal "Химия и жизнь" ( "Chemistry and Life" ) (1990-1994). His writings were also published in local and central newspapers, and he authored monographs (e.g. "Dioxins as an environmental danger: retrospective and perspective" (1993)) and
9272-469: The enzyme acetylcholinesterase , preventing the normal breakdown of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine . Acetylcholine concentrations then increase at neuromuscular junctions to cause involuntary contraction of all skeletal muscles ( cholinergic crisis ). This then leads to respiratory and cardiac arrest (as the victim's heart and diaphragm muscles no longer function normally) and finally death from heart failure or suffocation as copious fluid secretions fill
9394-413: The factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary, and the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of the worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingual, in the context of developing heavy industry,
9516-451: The final reading amendments that state that all schools and kindergartens in the country are to transition to education in Latvian . From 2025, all children will be taught in Latvian only. On 28 September 2023, Latvian deputies approved The National Security Concept, according to which from 1 January 2026, all content created by Latvian public media (including LSM ) should be only in Latvian or
9638-402: The first binary formulation developed under the Foliant programme was used to make Substance 33 ( VR ), very similar to the more widely known VX , differing only in the alkyl substituents on its nitrogen and oxygen atoms. "This weapon was given the code name Novichok." A wide range of potential structures have been reported. These all feature the classical organophosphorus core (sometimes with
9760-561: The former Soviet Union such as Uzbekistan and has asserted that Novichok agents were produced only at Shikhany in Saratov Oblast , Russia. Mirzayanov also says that it was at Shikhany, in 1973, that scientist Pyotr Petrovich Kirpichev first produced Novichok agents; Vladimir Uglev joined him on the project in 1975. According to Mirzayanov, while production took place in Shikhany, the weapon was tested at Nukus between 1986 and 1989. Following
9882-672: The generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to
10004-480: The government bureaucracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative, legal, and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem. The earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language, during the 15th to 17th centuries. Since then, the trend of language policy in Russia has been standardization in both the restricted sense of reducing dialectical barriers between ethnic Russians, and
10126-536: The hands of others." On 13 March the BBC asked Vladimir Putin if Russia was "behind the poisoning of" Skripal and he answered "Get to the bottom of it first then we can discuss it" while he delegated a spokesperson to claim that "a circus show in the British parliament" was the upshot. Boris Johnson , the Foreign Secretary , refused to shake hands with Russian ambassador Alexander Yakovenko as he expressed "outrage" over
10248-519: The harm done by the Novichok agent. Many claimed structures from this group also contain cross-linking agent motifs which may covalently bind to the acetylcholinesterase enzyme's active site in several places, perhaps explaining the rapid denaturing of the enzyme that is claimed to be characteristic of the Novichok agents. Zoran Radić, a chemist at the University of California, San Diego, performed an in silico docking study with Mirzayanov's version of
10370-417: The international community and their fellow citizens." Mirzayanov now lives in the U.S. Further disclosures followed when Vladimir Uglev, one of Russia's leading binary weapons scientists, revealed the existence of A-232/Novichok-5 in an interview with the magazine Novoye Vremya in early 1994. In his 1998 interview with David E. Hoffman for The Washington Post the chemist claimed that he helped invent
10492-500: The last, which was not developed until 1980, could be made into a powder. Unlike the interview twenty years earlier, he denied any binary agents were developed successfully, at least up until his involvement in the research ceased in 1994. In the 1990s, the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) obtained a sample of one Novichok agent from a Russian scientist, and the sample was analysed in Sweden, according to
10614-516: The levels of deadly substances were eighty times greater than the maximum safe concentration. The Prosecutor-General of Russia effectively admitted the existence of Novichok agents when he brought a treason case against Mirzayanov. According to expert witness testimonies that three scientists prepared for the KGB , Novichok and other related chemical agents had indeed been produced and therefore Mirzayanov's disclosure represented high treason . Mirzayanov
10736-686: The major research and testing site for Novichok agents. Small, experimental batches of the weapons may have been tested on the nearby Ustyurt Plateau . Fitzpatrick also writes that the agents may have been tested in a research centre in Krasnoarmeysk near Moscow. Precursor chemicals were made at the Pavlodar Chemical Plant in Soviet Kazakhstan , which was also thought to be the intended Novichok weapons production site, until its still-under-construction chemical warfare agent production building
10858-472: The major research and testing site for Novichok at the Chemical Research Institute in Nukus, under a $ 6 million Cooperative Threat Reduction programe. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon , a British chemical weapons expert and former commanding officer of the UK's Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiation and Nuclear Regiment and its NATO equivalent, "dismissed" suggestions that Novichok agents could be found in other places in
10980-655: The median lethal dose for inhaled A-234 is 0.2 mg (5000 lethal doses in a gram) and is below 0.1 mg for A-230 (10 000 lethal doses in a gram). The agents are reportedly capable of being delivered as a liquid, aerosol or gas via a variety of systems, including artillery shells, bombs, missiles and spraying devices. Mirzayanov gives somewhat different structures for Novichok agents in his autobiography than those which have been identified by Western experts. The Western formulations suffered from imperfect information, as can be seen in Fig. 1 of Chai et al in which Mirzayanov describes
11102-513: The military and 18 vehicles were deployed to assist with decontamination at locations in and around Salisbury. Up to 38 people in Salisbury have been affected by the agent to an undetermined extent. Russian language Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family . It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and
11224-434: The murder became "one of the first in the series of poisonings organised by Russia's security services". The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs analysed the substance and announced that it was "a phosphorus-based military-grade nerve agent" "whose formula was strictly classified". According to Nesterov, the administrative head of Shikhany, he did not know of "a single case of such poison being sold illegally" and noted that
11346-458: The murder, and that the security services had organised the murder on the orders of a senior Russian state official. Boris Kuznetsov , who represented Khutsishvili and believed in his innocence, blames "rogue intelligence officers". Leonid Rink, an employee of GosNIIOKhT, received a one-year suspended sentence for selling Novichok agents to unnamed buyers "of Chechen ethnicity" soon after the poisoning of Kivelidi and Izmailova. On 12 March 2018,
11468-516: The northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region . Russian was also the main foreign language taught in school in China between 1949 and 1964. In Kazakhstan , Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of
11590-515: The other hand, before the war, almost a quarter of Ukrainians were in favour of granting Russian the status of the state language, while after the beginning of Russia's invasion the support for the idea dropped to just 7%. In peacetime, the idea of raising the status of Russian was traditionally supported by residents of the south and east . But even in these regions, only a third of the respondents were in favour, and after Russia's full-scale invasion , their number dropped by almost half. According to
11712-455: The other three languages in the East Slavic branch. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect , although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century,
11834-446: The parliament approved a bill to close up all Russian language schools and kindergartens by the school year. The transition to only Estonian language schools and kindergartens will start in the 2024-2025 school year. In Latvia , Russian is officially considered a foreign language. 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 26% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 18 February 2012, Latvia held
11956-453: The peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity. This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky , who toward the end of his life wrote: "Scholars of Russian dialects mostly studied phonetics and morphology. Some scholars and collectors compiled local dictionaries. We have almost no studies of lexical material or
12078-409: The plasma of the victim poisoned by A-230. If a victim is poisoned by other Novichok type agents, the masses are different. This method allows identification of poisons at few ppb ratio, but that may be insufficient for reliable detection of the isotopic signature of the adducts, and therefore an unambiguous identification of the geographic origin of the poison. According to Vladimir Uglev, who headed
12200-480: The poison "is used by professional spies". Vladimir Khutsishvili, a former business partner of Kivelidi's, was subsequently convicted of the killings. According to The Independent , "A closed trial found that his business partner had obtained the substance via intermediaries from an employee of the State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology (ГосНИИОХТ / GosNIIOKhT) , which was involved in
12322-616: The poisoning of the Skripals, former head of the GosNIIOKhT security department Nikolay Volodin confirmed in an interview to Novaya Gazeta that there have been tests at Nukus, and said that dogs were used . In May 2018, the Irish Independent reported that "Germany's foreign intelligence service secured a sample of the Soviet-developed nerve agent Novichok in the 1990s and passed on its knowledge to partners including Britain and
12444-455: The population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language. In October 2023, Kazakhstan drafted a media law aimed at increasing the use of the Kazakh language over Russian, the law stipulates that the share of the state language on television and radio should increase from 50% to 70%, at a rate of 5% per year, starting in 2025. In Kyrgyzstan , Russian
12566-418: The population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 67% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2019 Belarusian census , out of 9,413,446 inhabitants of the country, 5,094,928 (54.1% of the total population) named Belarusian as their native language, with 61.2% of ethnic Belarusians and 54.5% of ethnic Poles declaring Belarusian as their native language. In everyday life in
12688-475: The pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/ , /ĭ/ . Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ('frost') is transliterated moroz , and мышь ('mouse'), mysh or myš' . Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration
12810-466: The proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names. Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family . It is a descendant of Old East Slavic , a language used in Kievan Rus' , which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid-13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language , its closest relatives are Ukrainian , Belarusian , and Rusyn ,
12932-481: The purpose of obtaining analytical data to help defend against these novel toxic compounds. The Soviet Union and Russia reportedly developed extremely potent fourth-generation chemical weapons from the 1970s until the early 1990s, according to a publication by two chemists, Lev Fyodorov and Vil Mirzayanov , in Moskovskiye Novosti weekly in 1992. The publication appeared just on the eve of Russia's signing of
13054-404: The respiratory muscle paralysis caused by some nerve agents. Pralidoxime is not effective in reactivating acetylcholinesterase inhibited by some older nerve agents such as soman or the Novichok nerve agents, described in the literature as being up to eight times more toxic than the nerve agent VX . The US Army has funded studies of the use of galantamine along with atropine in the treatment of
13176-491: The respondents), while according to the 2002 census – 142.6 million people (99.2% of the respondents). In Ukraine , Russian is a significant minority language. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers. 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 5 September 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed
13298-552: The six official languages of the United Nations , as well as the fourth most widely used language on the Internet . Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script ; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without—the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has a hard or soft counterpart, and
13420-675: The survey carried out by RATING in August 2023 in the territory controlled by Ukraine and among the refugees, almost 60% of the polled usually speak Ukrainian at home, about 30% – Ukrainian and Russian, only 9% – Russian. Since March 2022, the use of Russian in everyday life has been noticeably decreasing. For 82% of respondents, Ukrainian is their mother tongue, and for 16%, Russian is their mother tongue. IDPs and refugees living abroad are more likely to use both languages for communication or speak Russian. Nevertheless, more than 70% of IDPs and refugees consider Ukrainian to be their native language. In
13542-459: The syntax of Russian dialects." After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930: The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism. On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to
13664-452: The title Novichok". In September 2020, the German government said that opposition figure and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny , who was evacuated from Omsk to Berlin for treatment in late August after becoming ill during his flight, was poisoned by a Novichok agent. Novichok has been known to most Western intelligence services since the 1990s, and in 2016 Iranian chemists working at
13786-770: The two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern , Central (or Middle), and Southern , with Moscow lying in the Central region. The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly, a phenomenon called okanye ( оканье ). Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e⁓i̯ɛ/ in place of Proto-Slavic * ě and /o⁓u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/ , respectively. Another Northern dialectal morphological feature
13908-506: The use of the language has some presence in certain areas. A large part of the population, especially the older generations, can speak Russian as a foreign language. However, English has replaced Russian as lingua franca in Lithuania and around 80% of young people speak English as their first foreign language. In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008). According to
14030-412: The victim's lungs. As can be seen with other organophosphate poisonings, Novichok agents may cause lasting nerve damage, resulting in permanent disablement of victims, according to Russian scientists. Their effect on humans was demonstrated by the accidental exposure of Andrei Zheleznyakov, one of the scientists involved in their development, to the residue of an unspecified Novichok agent while working in
14152-460: The world, according to the OPCW. Novichok was also involved in the poisoning of a British couple in Amesbury, Wiltshire, four months later, believed to have been caused by residual nerve agent discarded after the Salisbury attack. The attacks led to the death of one person, left three others in a critical condition from which they recovered, and briefly hospitalised a police officer. The Russian government denies producing or researching agents "under
14274-490: Was arrested on 22 October 1992 and sent to Lefortovo prison for divulging state secrets. He was released later because "not one of the formulas or names of poisonous substances in the Moscow News article was new to the Soviet press, nor were locations ... of testing sites revealed." According to Yevgenia Albats , "the real state secret revealed by Fyodorov and Mirzayanov was that generals had lied—and were still lying—to both
14396-486: Was demolished in 1987 in view of the forthcoming 1990 Chemical Weapons Accord and the Chemical Weapons Convention . Since its independence in 1991, Uzbekistan has been working with the government of the United States to dismantle and decontaminate the sites where the Novichok agents and other chemical weapons were tested and developed. Between 1999 and 2002 the United States Department of Defense dismantled
14518-405: Was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska , Russian
14640-421: Was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 19% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2014 Moldovan census , Russians accounted for 4.1% of Moldova's population, 9.4% of the population declared Russian as their native language, and 14.5% said they usually spoke Russian. According to the 2010 census in Russia , Russian language skills were indicated by 138 million people (99.4% of
14762-531: Was participant and speaker at annual international dioxin congresses (beginning in 1992). In 1992, he founded and registered the Russian Anti-dioxin Association and by July he published an article on Soviet chemical weapons in the weekly "Top Secret". As a result of this, in October he was accused of divulging state secrets in the "Moscow News" . He wrote two monographs on this topic, published by
14884-402: Was the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German, and Japanese. Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary and phonetics, a number of dialects still exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between
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