Britain warns Russia over double spy’s mystery illness

BRITAIN warned Russia yesterday of a robust response if the Kremlin was “behind” the mysterious illness that struck down a former double agent convicted of betraying dozens of spies to British intelligence.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson named Sergei Skripal, once a colonel in Russia’s GRU military intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia as the two people who were found unconscious on Sunday on a bench outside a shopping center in southern England.

Skripal, 66, and his 33-yearold daughter were exposed to what police said was an unknown substance in the city of Salisbury. Both are still critically ill in intensive care.

“We don’t know exactly what has taken place in Salisbury, but if it’s as bad as it looks, it is another crime in the litany of crimes that we can lay at Russia’s door,” Johnson told the British parliament.

“It is clear that Russia, I’m afraid, is now in many respects a malign and disruptive force, and the UK is in the lead across the world in trying to counteract that activity.”

If Moscow was shown to be behind Skripal’s illness, Johnson said, it would be difficult to see how UK representation could go to the World Cup in Russia in a normal way. A government source said that meant attendance of ministers or dignitaries.

A previous British inquiry said President Vladimir Putin probably approved the 2006 murder of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium-210 in London. Russia has repeatedly denied any involvement in Litvinenko’s killing.

Litvinenko, 43, who fled Russia for Britain six years before he was poisoned, died after drinking green tea laced with the rare and very potent radioactive isotope at London’s Millennium Hotel.

His murder sent Britain’s relations with Russia to what was then a post-Cold War low.

While British authorities said there was no known risk to the public from the unidentified substance, they sealed off the area where Skripal was found, a pizza restaurant called Zizzi and the Bishop’s Mill pub in the centre of Salisbury.

Skripal, who passed the identity of dozens of spies to the MI6 foreign intelligence agency, was given refuge in Britain after he was exchanged in 2010 for Russian spies caught in the West as part of a Cold Warstyle spy swap at the Vienna airport.

The Kremlin said it was ready to cooperate if Britain asked it for help investigating the incident with Skripal.

Calling it a “tragic situation,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin had no information about the incident. Asked to respond to British media speculation that Russia had poisoned Skripal, he said: “It didn’t take them long.”