In the wake of the #Novichok nerve agent attack on Sergei #Skripal and his daughter in #Salisbury, a variety of suggestions that anyone other than Vladimir Putin’s government is responsible have been circulating on Twitter. #Whataboutism 
I downloaded recent tweets for the hashtag #Novichok, which started seeing significant traffic March 12th. This yielded 15371 tweets from 10668 accounts. I classified the top 50 accounts by retweet volume (74% of tweets in the set) based on their attribution of the attack.
This chart shows the volume for #Novichok tweets, classified by the perspective being expressed. Note that the portion of the volume in the “whataboutism” category has increased greatly over the past 12 hours.
I decided to update the #Novichok dataset a day after originally looking at the hashtag. The whataboutism/conspiracy theory tweets have now comprised the majority of the traffic for about a day and half.
This network centers around five accounts that tweet in Russian: @lastochkina984, @glinka768, @beregovaya768, @ponchik984, and @borisovrealtyRu. Each of these accounts has posted exactly one #Novichok tweet, but the tweets appear unrelated to the Salisbury attack.
The #Novichok tweets from those five accounts were retweeted by 64 others, 47 of which RT'd all five. Most have female avatars and handles ending in 3 digits. It's possible these are human-operated sockpuppets amplifying the five main nodes, but automation seems more likely.
