[Independent] Accusations and recriminations between Britain and Russia are set to escalate with the news that scientists at the Porton Down military research facility have been unable to establish exactly where the novichok nerve agent used to carry out the Skripal attack was manufactured.The admission comes the day before Moscow convenes an emergency meeting of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague in which it is expected to demand access to samples from the Salisbury poisoning for analysis by Russian scientists.
Russia’s embassy in London responded that Porton Down’s assessment "proves that all political declarations on the Russian origin of the crime are nothing but assumptions not stemming from objective facts or the course of the investigation".
The development also comes after Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, suggested that British intelligence services carried out the attempted assassination of the former MI6 agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia and claimed that it had proved "beneficial" in distracting attention from Theresa May’s government having to make major concessions to the European Union on Brexit.