“Overwhelming Evidence”. Conclusions of the UK investigation into the Novichok poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal by the GRU
Russian President Vladimir Putin must have 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, a British public inquiry concluded on Thursday.
Skripal was found with his daughter Yulia unconscious on a public bench in the southern English city of Salisbury in March 2018 after the nerve agent Novichok was applied to the doorknob at the entrance to his nearby home.
About four months later, Dawn Sturgess, a 44-year-old mother of three, died from exposure to the poison after her partner found a counterfeit perfume bottle that Russian spies had used to smuggle the military-grade nerve agent into the country, according to the inquest.
“Overwhelming Evidence of Russian State Involvement”
Skripal, his daughter and a police officer who went to the home of the former colonel of Russia's GRU military spy agency were left in critical condition from the effects of the poison, but have since recovered.
In his findings, the commission's chairman, former UK Supreme Court judge Anthony Hughes, said it was certain a team of GRU officers tried to assassinate Skripal, who sold Russian secrets to Britain and moved there after a spy swap in 2010.
“We have 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 an attack by the Russian state is overwhelming,” Hughes added.
Moscow has always denied any involvement, calling the allegations anti-Russian propaganda. The Russian Embassy in London did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hughes also claimed that the two Russians who put Novichok on Skripal's door threw away the bottle containing the poison without regard to the danger it posed to innocent people.
The investigation revealed that the contaminated perfume bottle contained enough poison to kill thousands of people.
These “stunningly reckless” actions mean that the would-be assassins, their superiors in the GRU and those who authorized the attack, right up to Putin himself, bear moral responsibility for Sturgess' death, Hughes said.
London imposes new sanctions against the GRU
The British police have already charged, in absentia, the three members of the GRU team suspected of the assassination.
On Thursday, the government announced new sanctions against the GRU intelligence agency and summoned the Russian ambassador over what it called Moscow's “continued campaign of hostile activities”.
“Britain will always stand up to Putin's brutal regime and denounce his crime machine for what it is,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement.
The Salisbury incident sparked the biggest diplomatic expulsions between East and West since the end of the Cold War, and relations between Moscow and London have further deteriorated since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022, with Britain providing significant military aid to Kiev.
Two of the Russians accused by Britain of carrying out the poisoning later appeared on Russian television to deny involvement, saying they were innocent tourists visiting the city's cathedral. All three have denied any involvement.
The main suspects in the poisoning of Skripal are two alleged GRU agents who entered the UK under the identities of Aleksandr Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – in reality Anatoli Cepiga and Aleksandr Mishkin.
The poisoning was 'a public statement'
Hughes said Russia has an “increased appetite for risk”, citing the annexation of the Crimean peninsula and the downing of the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet, both in 2014, and said he expected the attack to be a vivid demonstration of Russian power.
“Russia's attack on Sergei Skripal was not, it seems, designed simply as revenge against him, but constituted a public statement, for both international and domestic consumption, that Russia will act decisively in what it considers to be its own interests,” the report reads.
Although Putin had previously denounced Skripal as a traitor, the inquiry concluded there was nothing to suggest the double agent was in imminent danger or that more could have been done to protect him.
Thursday's report is the second major inquiry accusing Putin of attacks on British soil against alleged enemies.
A 2016 investigation concluded that Putin likely ordered the assassination in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident and former FSB security service agent, using radioactive polonium-210.
