Russia surveilled ex-spy’s daughter for some 5 years
— Russian intelligence agencies monitored the emails of former spy Sergei Skripal’s daughter Yulia for at least five years before the two were poisoned, Britain’s national security adviser said in a letter made public Friday.
Mark Sedwill made the assertion in a letter to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg explaining Britain’s conclusion that the Russian government is to blame for poisoning the Skripals with a military-grade nerve agent on March 4.
He said only Russia has the “technical means, operational experience and the motive” for the attack.
Moscow has strongly denied responsibility and says Britain is waging a defamation campaign against it.
In the letter, Sedwill said the Soviet Union developed fourth generation nerve agents known as Novichoks in the 1980s at the State Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology near Volgograd under the codeword FOLIANT.
He said that after the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia signed the Chemical Weapons Convention without reporting its ongoing work on Novichoks.
Russia denies the British claims about Novichok, saying that it completed the destruction of all its Soviet-era chemical weapons arsenals last year under international oversight. It insists that the nerve agent used on the SkriLONDON pals could easily have been manufactured in any of the other countries that have advanced chemical research programs.
Yulia Skripal, 33, was released from the hospital this week. The poisoning happened in the city of Salisbury shortly after she arrived from Moscow for a visit. Her father remains hospitalized but British health officials say he is improving.