U.K. says Russia monitored daughter of former spy for years before poisoning
LONDON — Russian intelligence agencies monitored the emails of former spy Sergei Skripal’s daughter Yulia for at least five years before the two were poisoned, Britain’s national security adviser said in a letter made public Friday.
Mark Sedwill made the assertion in a letter to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg explaining Britain’s conclusion that the Russian government is to blame for poisoning the Skripals with a military-grade nerve agent on March 4.
He said only Russia has the “technical means, operational experience and the motive” for the attack.
Moscow has strongly denied responsibility and says Britain is waging a defamation campaign against it.
In the letter, Sedwill said the Soviet Union developed fourthgeneration nerve agents known as Novichoks in the 1980s at the State Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology near Volgograd under the code word FOLIANT.
“It is highly likely that Novichoks were developed to prevent detection by the West and to circumvent international chemical weapons controls,” he said.
“The Russian state has previously produced Novichoks and would still be capable of doing so.”
He said that after the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia signed the Chemical Weapons Convention without reporting its ongoing work on Novichoks.
He said it was highly unlikely that any former Soviet republic besides Russia pursued an offensive chemical weapons program.
Russia denies the British claims about Novichoks, saying it completed the destruction of all its Soviet-era chemical weapons arsenals last year under international oversight.
It insists the nerve agent used on the Skripals could easily have been manufactured in any of the other countries that have advanced chemical research programs.
Sedwill said Moscow had a proven record of state-sponsored assassinations and had tested ways of delivering chemical weapons, including the use of door handles to spread nerve agents, as Britain believes was done in the Skripal case.
Russia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Alexander Yakovenko, dismissed the charges Friday as unfounded and untrue.
Yulia Skripal, 33, was released from hospital this week.
Her father remains in hospital but British health officials say he is improving.