LONDON — Russia's covert operations against its former agents was thrown back in the spotlight with new developments on Tuesday in a pair of high profile incidents that took place on British soil.
Police identified a third suspect in the attempted poisoning of a Russian double agent in 2018 and the European Court of Human Rights said Russia was responsible for an earlier political assassination in Britain — that of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.
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For the first time, police described all three men allegedly involved in the 2018 attempted assassination of double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England as Russian military intelligence operatives.
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Speaking in Parliament on Tuesday, Britain’s home secretary Priti Patel called the nerve agent attack “utterly, utterly reckless” but not the first time that Russia has launched a “brazen attack” on British soil.
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She said that the British government would “continue to respond extremely robustly to the enduring and significant threat from the Russian state.”
“We respect the people of Russia but we will do whatever it takes, everything it will take to keep our country safe,” she said.
The newly identified Denis Sergeev, who used the alias Sergey Fedotov when traveling in the U.K., was charged with conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, grievous bodily harm, possession and use of a chemical weapon.
Britain demands Russia explain ‘what has gone on’ after latest nerve agent poisoning
It was a spy poisoning drama that rocked a nation. In March 2018, police discovered a father and daughter slumped on a park bench in the city of Salisbury, in southern England.
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It was later discovered that Skripal, who was a former double agent, and Yulia, his adult daughter, had been poisoned with Novichok, a rare nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union. One of the police officers who touched Skripal’s front door handle, which was smeared with a nerve agent, was later hospitalized.
They all survived, but another British woman later died after she sprayed herself with Novichok contained in a discarded perfume bottle allegedly used in the attack.
The case inflamed diplomatic tensions between Moscow and the West. Then prime minister, Theresa May, pointed the finger at Russia, and hundreds of diplomats were expelled by Russia and Western nations.
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Police already charged two other suspects in the case — Alexander Mishkin, who used the alias Alexander Petrov while in Britain, and Anatoliy Chepiga, who went by Ruslan Boshirov.
Russia has vehemently denied any involvement. They even put the pair on Russian television, where they claimed they were just sightseeing tourists who happened to be in famed cathedral town around the same time as the attack.
While this was the first time Sergeev had been named by British authorities, he had previously been identified by the Bellingcat journalism website following a months-long investigation. Sergeev was alleged to have been part of a unit that was involved in poisoning of an arms dealer in Bulgaria in 2015.
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“The investigation team has been piecing together evidence that suggests that Petrov, Boshirov and Fedotov have all previously worked with each other and on behalf of the Russian state as part of operations carried out outside of Russia,” Dean Haydon, the senior national coordinator for British counterterrorism policing, said.
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“We can't go into the detail of how, but we have the evidence that links them to the GRU,” Haydon said at a news briefing.
He described the three of them as “dangerous individuals” who “tried to murder people here in the U.K. and also brought an extremely dangerous chemical weapon into the U.K. by means unknown.”
Police released a grainy photo of Sergeev arriving at Heathrow Airport on March 2, 2018, and said that before he left the U.K. on March 4, he met his colleagues several times in London.
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Police said they would apply for an Interpol notice to be issued for Sergeev, a.k.a. Fedotov, on Tuesday. Britain does not have a bilateral extradition agreement with Russia, but if any of the three suspects were to visit a country outside of Russia that has such an agreement, then they could be extradited to the U.K. and brought to trial.
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Meanwhile, the European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday said that Russia was responsible for the killing of Litvinenko, a former KGB agent who died in London in 2006 after drinking tea spiked with a radioactive material.
Their findings echo those in 2016, when a British inquiry concluded that the killing Litvinenko, an outspoken critic of the Kremlin who had defected to Britain, was “probably approved” by President Vladimir Putin.
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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the ECHR's judgment was unsubstantiated because the court could not have all available facts. “It is unlikely that the ECHR holds any authority or technical capacity to possess information on this score,” he said. “You know that this investigation hasn't produced any results thus far. Therefore, making such claims is groundless, to say the least,” he said.
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Andrei Lugovoi, a parliamentary deputy implicated by Britain in the Litvinenko murder, said he considered the ECHR decision “unjust, illegal, politically biased.” Britain’s director of public prosecutions said in 2007 there was enough evidence to charge Lugovoi over the murder.
Lugovoi also dismissed the ECHR finding that Russia did not properly investigate the murder. “This is not true. The Russian prosecutor’s office and the Investigative Committee did everything to establish the truth,” he told Interfax news agency.
Dixon reported from Moscow.
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