Russia says the UK is ‘playing with fire’ over ‘fake poisoning’ story
Johnson: ‘No doubt they are to blame’
RUSSIA LAST night accused the UK of inventing a “fake story” and “playing with fire” over the Salisbury spy poisoning.
Moscow’s UN ambassador Vasily Nebenzya told a meeting of the UN Security Council: “We have told our British colleagues that you are playing with fire and you will be sorry.”
The UK claims Russia is behind the attack. Russia denies responsibility.
The news came after Yulia Skripal said her strength is “growing daily” after the novichok nerve agent attack which left her and her father Sergei in intensive care.
Her first public comments since the March 4 attack were released shortly after Russian TV reported that she had contacted a relative in Moscow to say she and Sergei Skripal were recovering and that she would soon be discharged from hospital in Salisbury. In her first statement since coming out of a coma, Ms Skripal, 33, said: “I woke up over a week ago now and am glad to say my strength is growing daily. I am grateful for the interest in me and for the many messages of goodwill that I have received.”
In the statement released by the Metropolitan Police, she thanked healthcare workers at Salisbury District Hospital as well as “the people of Salisbury that came to my aid when my father and I were incapacitated”.
BORIS JOHNSON accused Russia of “shameless cynicism” after it again denied responsibility for the nerve agent attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal.
The Kremlin is running a “disinformation campaign”, the Foreign Secretary said, after Moscow called a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the Salisbury poisoning and its ambassador to the UK repeated denials during a 90-minute press conference in London.
As Britain maintained its diplomatic squeeze on Moscow and Ms Skripal made her first public comments, ambassador Alexander Yakovenko attacked the Government while answering questions at the Russian Embassy in London.
Earlier, Security Minister Ben Wallace dismissed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s claim the UK has “legitimate questions to answer”, insisting it was “beyond reasonable doubt” that Moscow was to blame for poisoning the Skripals with the nerve agent novichok.
It came after Russia lost a vote at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague on its demand for its experts to be involved in testing samples of the substance used in the Salisbury attack.
Mr Johnson said: “Yesterday, Russia failed to persuade OPCW that they, the chief suspect, should join an investigation of attempted assassinations in Salisbury.
“Today’s gambit is to rope the UN Security Council into their disinformation campaign. The world will see through this shameless cynicism.”
After the OPCW meeting Russian officials pointed to the “lies by Tony Blair” over Iraq as they criticised the intelligence about the attack.
But Mr Wallace told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that comparisons to the flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were not valid.
“There’s no missing nerve agent that no-one can find – it was used in Salisbury, we had three people seriously ill, two obviously remain in hospital in critical condition, and there is no doubt that we have found nerve agent,” he said.
“That nerve agent has been identified to being manufactured we believe in Russia and we believe that the nerve agent, the novichok type of nerve agent, is only capable of being produced by a nation state, and then we add that to intelligence we hold, we add that to some of the police investigation that’s going on right now, and we can say that roads lead to Russia, that we are beyond reasonable doubt of the view that the Russian state is behind this.”
Mr Yakovenko denied the UK’s assessment that Russia maintained a stockpile of novichok “likely for assassination”, describing it as “untrue... not supported by any evidence ... unacceptable”, denying his country had ever even produced the nerve agent.
The ambassador said there were “a lot of suspicions” in relation to a string of deaths of Russian citizens in the UK over the past decade, including businessman Nikolai Glushkov, whose body was discovered in his south London home last month.
He said: “If we take the last 10 years, so many Russian citizens died here in the UK under very strange circumstances.”
And discussing the OPCW vote, he said the Western position had not won the support of most countries, with six of the 41 members backing Russia, 15 voting against – including the UK, US and several EU and Nato states – 17 abstaining, two absent and one not entitled to vote.
He said: “The majority of the world community is not supporting the Western approach.”
Meanwhile, the Foreign Office said Ms Skripal had so far chosen not to take up the Russian Embassy’s offer of consular assistance.
“Ms Skripal is now able to choose if and when to take up this offer, but to date she has not done so,” a spokesman said.