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Russian President Vladimir Putin authorised the operation that resulted in the fatal poisoning of a British citizen with novichok nerve agent in Salisbury in 2018, a UK public inquiry found on Thursday.
The report, by former Supreme Court judge Lord Anthony Hughes, said Moscow’s GRU military intelligence service was responsible for the death of Dawn Sturgess, 44, who sprayed herself with novichok-infused fluid from a perfume bottle.
The intended target of the nerve agent had been Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy who defected to the UK. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were in critical condition in hospital for a week after the attack in March 2018.
Hughes said the novichok had been brought to Salisbury by two of a three-person team of GRU operatives who came to the UK to kill Sergei Skripal. Sturgess came into contact with the nerve agent later.
“There is a direct causal link between the actions of all those individuals and Dawn Sturgess’s death [in July 2018],” Hughes said. “They and only they bear moral responsibility for it.”
After publication of the findings, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced new sanctions on the GRU, adding that the UK would always stand up to “Putin’s brutal regime” and “murderous machine”.
Foreign secretary Yvette Cooper had also summoned Russia’s ambassador to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in order to demand a response to the inquiry’s findings, the government added.
“The report confirms what the UK government has long assessed — Russia’s reckless use of a military grade nerve agent on UK soil led to the death of a British citizen,” the government said. “The FCDO further demanded an end to Russia’s ongoing campaign of hostile activity against the UK and Nato.”
The nerve agent attack in 2018 sent relations between London and Moscow to new lows, with then prime minister Baroness Theresa May ordering 23 Russian diplomats identified as “undeclared intelligence officers” to leave the UK — the biggest expulsion since the cold war.
