RUSSIA: IT’S FAKE AND MEANS NOTHING

MOSCOW said yesterday it was ‘absolute nonsense’ to charge two of its military spies with the novichok poisonings and accused Britain of tampering with CCTV evidence.

Senior Kremlin officials suggested the names and photographs of suspects Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov could have been invented and they ‘mean nothing’.

A string of Russian government officials said the accusations made by Theresa May were meaningless because only the aliases of the attackers had been made public.

Its Ministry of Foreign Affairs even poked fun at the UK prime minister by posting videos of her ‘robotic’ dancing from a recent trip to Africa on its social media channels. Seemingly timed to deliberately undermine her authority, the posts compared Mrs May’s moves unfavourably to those of Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

Russia also accused Britain of tampering with CCTV images of the two GRU agents. Pictures released by police appear to show them separately walking along the same section of Gatwick Airport but the time stamp for the images is exactly the same: 16.22:43.

Ms Zakharova said: ‘Either the date and the exact time were overlaid on the image or the staff of the Russian GRU learned to walk simultaneously – but their images are captured in two different photographs.’