Russia says U.K., U.S. behind nerve-agent attack

MOSCOW — Russia’s spy chief accused the U.K. and the U.S. of poisoning a former double agent to maintain Western unity against Moscow, as the European Union cleaved hard to its support for the British government’s line of blaming the Kremlin for the attack.

The nerve-agent attack was a “grotesque provocation” carried out by U.S. and British secret services,” as part of the West’s fight against the “so-called Russian threat,” Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, told a security conference in Moscow on Wednesday.

The EU has “full confidence in the U.K. investigation” into the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, according to a statement presented Wednesday at a meeting on the case of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. It’s “imperative” that Russia responds to the U.K.’s “legitimate questions” and starts to cooperate with the chemical weapons agency, the EU said in the statement.

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May rallied allies in the U.S., Europe, Australia and Canada to conduct coordinated expulsions of more than 150 Russian diplomats last month after she told parliament that it was “highly likely” Russia was responsible for the March 4 attack in the city of Salisbury. Russia, which denies any involvement, retaliated with tit-for-tat expulsions last week.

Russia has called for a meeting of the United Nations Security Council today to discuss the U.K.’s allegations in the Skripal case, the Russian Mission to the U.N. said on Twitter.

The U.K. must “apologize to the Russian side,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters late Tuesday in Ankara, after the head of the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, England, said in an interview with Sky News that it hasn’t established the poison was made in Russia, and that it wasn’t the scientists’ job to do so.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said in an interview on Germany’s DW television last month that Porton Down scientists “were absolutely categorical” that Russia was the source of the Novichok poison. Skripal is critically ill in the hospital, while his daughter is said to be conscious and talking.

Johnson “has some very serious questions to answer,” U.K. opposition Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn told reporters Wednesday. The foreign secretary “seems to have completely exceeded the information that he’d been given and told the world in categorical terms what he believed had happened, and it’s not backed up by the evidence he claimed to have got from Porton Down,” Corbyn said. A spokesman said the Labor leader still believed Russia was responsible for the attack.

Germany, which expelled four Kremlin diplomats, stands by the U.K.’s “very plausible” evidence that Russia was responsible for the poisoning, Foreign Ministry spokesman Rainer Breul told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday. A deputy chairman of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, Armin Laschet, raised doubts on Twitter, saying: “When you force almost all NATO countries to solidarity, shouldn’t one have certain evidence?”

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons met in a closed session at Russia’s request to discuss the first offensive use of a chemical weapon in Europe since World War II. Results of the organization’s technical evaluation of the incident, which was requested by the U.K., are expected to be ready next week, the organization’s director general, Ahmet Uzumcu, said in a report to the meeting. The details will be sent to the U.K., which has said it wants the report shared with other states, he said.

Russia’s demand for a joint inquiry into the Salisbury attack is “perverse,” John Foggo, the U.K.’s acting representative at the chemical weapons organization, told the hearing in a statement. There’s no requirement under the Chemical Weapons Convention “for a victim to engage the likely perpetrator in a joint investigation,” he said.

The Russian embassy in the U.K. on Wednesday highlighted a Foreign Office tweet from March 22 that stated that Porton Down’s analysis “made clear that this was a military-grade Novichok nerve agent produced in Russia.”

The tweet was sent during a briefing on the Salisbury incident by U.K. Ambassador to Russia Laurie Bristow and was later removed because “it was truncated and did not accurately reflect” his words, a Foreign Office spokesman in London said. A recording of the briefing on its website showed the ambassador said there’s “no doubt that the Novichok was produced in Russia by the Russian state.”

Porton Down’s scientists “precisely identified the nerve agent as a Novichok. It is not, and has never been, our responsibility to confirm the source of the agent,” the laboratory’s official Twitter account stated late Tuesday. “This chemical identity of the nerve agent is one of four factors used by the Government to attribute the use of chemical weapons in Salisbury to Russia.” Information for this article was contributed by Alexander Kell, Birgit Jennen, James Kraus and Robert Hutton of Bloomberg News.