Putin authorised 2018 poisoning of ex-Russian spy, British inquiry says
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Police officers stand outside the street where Ms Dawn Sturgess lived before dying after being exposed to a Novichok nerve agent.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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LONDON – Russian President Vladimir Putin must have ordered the Novichok nerve agent attack on Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in 2018 in a “reckless” display of power that led to the death of an innocent woman, a British public inquiry concluded on Dec 4.
Mr Skripal was found along with his daughter, Yulia, slumped unconscious on a public bench in the southern English city of Salisbury in March 2018 after Novichok was applied to the front door handle of his nearby home.
About four months later, mother-of-three Dawn Sturgess, 44, died from exposure to the poison after her partner found a counterfeit perfume bottle that Russian spies used to smuggle the military-grade nerve agent into Britain, the inquiry said.
The Skripals and a police officer who went to Mr Skripal’s house were left critically ill from its effects, but recovered.
In his conclusions, the chair, former British Supreme Court judge Anthony Hughes, said he was certain a team of GRU military intelligence officers attempted to murder Mr Skripal, who sold Russian secrets to Britain and moved there after a 2010 spy swop.
“I have concluded that the operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal must have been authorised at the highest level by President Putin,” Mr Hughes said in his report.
“The evidence that this was a Russian state attack is overwhelming,” he said.
Russia has always denied any involvement, casting the accusations as anti-Russian propaganda.
Mr Hughes said the two Russians who smeared Novichok on Mr Skripal’s door discarded the bottle containing the poison without any regard to the danger it posed to innocent people.
The inquiry was told the contaminated perfume bottle contained enough poison to kill thousands of people.
These “astonishingly reckless” actions meant the would-be assassins, their GRU superiors and those who authorised the attack, up to Mr Putin himself, bore moral responsibility for Ms Sturgess’ death, Mr Hughes said.
New sanctions
British police have already charged in absentia the three suspected members of the Russian hit team.
On Dec 4, the government announced new sanctions against the GRU intelligence agency and summoned the Russian ambassador over what it called Moscow’s “ongoing campaign of hostile activity”.
“The UK will always stand up to Putin’s brutal regime and call out his murderous machine for what it is,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement.
The Salisbury incident triggered the biggest East-West diplomatic expulsions since the Cold War.
Relations between Moscow and London have deteriorated still further since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with Britain providing large amounts of military aid to Kyiv.
Two of the Russians accused by Britain of carrying out the poisoning later appeared on Russian TV to deny involvement, saying they were innocent tourists visiting the city’s cathedral. All three have denied any involvement.
‘A public statement’
Mr Hughes said Russia had an “increased risk appetite”, citing the annexation of Crimea and the downing of the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet, both in 2014, and said the attack was expected to stand as a vivid demonstration of Russian power.
“The attack on Sergei Skripal by Russia was not, it seems clear, designed simply as revenge against him, but amounted to a public statement, for both international and domestic consumption, that Russia will act decisively in what it regards as its own interests,” the report said.
Although Mr Putin previously denounced Mr Skripal as a traitor, the inquiry said there was nothing to suggest the double agent was imminently at risk or that more could have been done to protect him.
The Dec 4 report is the second major investigation to blame Mr Putin for attacks on British soil against his perceived enemies.
An inquiry in 2016 concluded that Mr Putin probably ordered the murder in London of Mr Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident and former agent of the FSB security service, using radioactive polonium-210. REUTERS
