‘A chilling message to warn political rivals’
RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin ordered the assassination of double agent Sergei Skripal to send a chilling message to his political rivals, it was claimed yesterday.
Kremlin opponent Dr Yuri Felshtinsky, 61, said it was no coincidence that the attack – which left the former spy and his daughter Yulia fighting for life – happened during the run-up to this month’s Russian presidential elections.
Dr Felshtinsky co-authored a book with Alexander Litvinenko, an outspoken critic of Putin who died in hospital three weeks after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, central London, in 2006.
He said the Russian would have been targeted by the FSB – Russia’s successor agency to then KGB.
Dr Felshtinsky said: “Poisoning is the method of choice for the FSB.
“In the context of the Russian presidential election, this has all the hallmarks of a Putin assassination.
“He is warning anyone in the FSB never to defect, as they’ll be hunted down and killed.
“It is also a sharp warning to any political opponent not to pose a real challenge in any way to the president.
“The underlying atmosphere of terror in Russia means that even mere speculation serves its purpose – even if there was a different cause here.
“In this case, Sergei Skripal was a colonel in the FSB – like Alexander Litvinenko.
“The FSB always kills defectors as a loyalty warning to its agents.” Putin is seeking another six-year term of office when Russians go to the polls on March 18.
Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, the country’s most senior counterterrorism officer, said: “We have to be alive to the fact of state threats.”
The Kremlin said that it had “no information” about the incident.