President Vladimir Putin is “morally responsible” for the death of Dawn Sturgess, the 44-year-old woman who was the only victim in the chemical attack which occurred in the city of Salisbury in March 2018 – according to London with the nerve agent Novichok – in which the former Russian fugitive agent Sergei Skripal, former officer of the GRU, Moscow’s military intelligence agency, sheltered in the south of England, was targeted.
This is the conclusion contained in the report of the commission of inquiry into the case which had already sparked a diplomatic clash between the United Kingdom and Russia and which is now causing tensions between the two countries to rise again. The results of the seven-year work conducted by former judge Anthony Hughes have produced a series of reactions: the Labor government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer not only summoned the Russian ambassador to London, Andrei Kelin, to ask him to account for the “hostile activity” by Moscow, still ongoing according to the Foreign Office note, but also announced a package of sanctions to target the GRU “in its entirety”.
Starmer used very harsh words, speaking of the Kremlin’s “contempt for innocent lives”. “The United Kingdom will always oppose Putin’s brutal regime and will call his murderous machine what it is,” added the prime minister. The report states that the order to hit Skripal, who as well as his daughter Yulia escaped the poisoning attempt, “must have been authorized at the highest levels by President Putin.”
At an operational level, the finger is pointed at the two main suspects: Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, believed to be GRU agents. The 44-year-old Sturgess was a marginalized English woman who, finding an alleged advanced sample of Novichok in a park with her partner, bottled like a fake perfume, sprayed it on herself, only to die in July 2018 from the consequences of the poisoning.
The inquiry concluded that despite some “shortcomings” in Skripal’s security management, it was not “unreasonable” for British intelligence to believe there was not a high risk of assassination. Although, as the media points out, there are a number of questions that have not been answered.
Starting from the fact that Skripal himself had limited himself to sending a written statement to the inquiry: President Hughes had denied not only his summons and that of his daughter, but also any video intervention of the two for reasons of their security and “privacy”. While from Moscow the spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, branded the findings of the report as “tasteless fairy tales” and asked where Yulia Skripal and her father have been for the last seven years, as well as condemning the “illegitimate” British sanctions, with Russia reserving the right to take retaliatory measures.