Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Novichok nerve agent attack on Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in 2018, in a “reckless” show of power that led to the death of an innocent woman, according to the conclusion of a UK public inquiry released this Thursday (4).
Skripal was found with his daughter Yulia unconscious on a public bench in the southern English city of Salisbury in March 2018 after Novichok was applied to the handle of the front door of their home.
About four months later, a mother of three, 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess, died from exposure to the poison after her partner found a counterfeit bottle of perfume that Russian spies had used to smuggle the military-grade nerve agent into the country.
“Overwhelming evidence”
The Skripals and a police officer who went to Skripal’s home became seriously ill from its effects, but recovered.
In his conclusions, the chairman, former UK Supreme Court judge Anthony Hughes, said he was certain that a team of GRU military intelligence officers had attempted to assassinate Skripal, who sold Russian secrets to the UK and moved there after a spy swap in 2010.
“I concluded that the operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal must have been authorized at the highest level, by President Putin,” Hughes said in his report.
“The evidence that this was a Russian state attack is overwhelming.”
Russia has always denied any involvement, casting the accusations as anti-Russian propaganda.
The Russian embassy in London did not immediately respond to a request for a position.
Hughes said the two Russians who administered Novichok to Skripal’s door discarded the bottle containing the poison without any consideration to the danger it posed to innocent people.
The investigation was told that the contaminated perfume bottle contained enough poison to kill thousands of people.
These “astoundingly reckless” actions meant that the would-be assassins, their GRU superiors and those who authorized the attack, even Putin himself, bore moral responsibility for Sturgess’ death, Hughes said.
British sanctions
British police have already charged the three suspects from the Russian team in absentia.
This Thursday (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 his murder machine what it is,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement.
The Salisbury incident triggered the largest East-West diplomatic expulsions since the Cold War, and relations between Moscow and London have deteriorated further since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with the United Kingdom providing large amounts of military aid to Kiev.
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 denied any involvement.
Poisoning was a “public declaration”
Hughes said Russia had an “increased appetite for risk”, citing the annexation of Crimea and the downing of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet, both in 2014, and said the attack was 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 declaration, for both international and domestic consumption, that Russia will act decisively in what it regards as its own interests,” the report said.
Although Putin had previously denounced Skripal as a traitor, the inquiry said there was nothing to suggest the double agent was at imminent risk or that more could have been done to protect him.
This Thursday’s report (4) is the second major investigation to blame Putin for attacks on British soil against his enemies.
An inquiry in 2016 concluded that Putin had likely ordered the murder in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident and former FSB security service agent, using radioactive polonium-210.
