Proof of suspicions will be hard to find

Investigators are unlikely to ever prove suspicions of Kremlin involvement after the alleged poisoning of a Russian double agent, an academic has said.

Dr Samuel Greene, director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London says the probe will never find evidence that will lead “all the way up the chain of command” in relation to Sergei Skripal, 66, and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia, who are fighting for their lives in hospital.

Yesterday Scotland Yard confirmed that the “substance” used against Skripal and his daughter was a nerve agent. Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said the poisoning was being treated as attempted murder and said the pair had been “targeted specifically”. One of the first police officers on the scene was also critically ill.

Greene said: “The reality is we don’t know the cause of the illness, so there’s nothing to trace, we don’t know where it’s going to be traced to. I think the reality is that even if in fact this has been somehow sanctioned or ordered out of the Kremlin, the reality is that we’re never going to find . . . the investigation is never going to find hard and fast evidence that would lead all the way up the chain of command.”

Greene said it is hard to imagine another explanation.

Asked if the public will ever know the truth about what happened, Greene said: “That’s kind of the espionage game. It’s very rare that the public actually gets to know really what was going on, even when we think we know.”

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has already noted that the case has “echoes” of the death of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident who was fatally poisoned in London in 2006. A public inquiry concluded in 2016 that the killing had “probably” been carried out with the approval of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It said the use of the radioactive substance — which could only have come from a nuclear reactor — was a “strong indicator” of state involvement and that two men had probably been acting under the direction of the FSB, Russia’s state agency. Putin has refused to accept the inquiry’s findings.

Yesterday Putin, in an interview with Russian state television, warned his country’s enemies, and referred to poison. Putin was not addressing the Skripal poisoning when he made the comments.

He said Western sanctions for Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and the insurgency in eastern Ukraine were part of “illegitimate and unfair” efforts to contain Russia, but added that “we will win in the long run”. He continued: “Those who serve us with poison will eventually swallow it and poison themselves”.