Skripal suspect ‘decorated’ by Russian leader

LONDON: One of the two suspects behind the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Britain was an intelligence operative who was personally decorated as a hero by President Vladimir Putin in 2014, investigative group Bellingcat said yesterday. The site said on Monday that the man, who used the alias “Alexander Petrov”, was in fact Alexander Mishkin, a trained military doctor employed by Moscow’s GRU military intelligence service.

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins and researcher Christo Grozev told reporters at an event in the British parliament Tuesday that they discovered Mishkin had taken part in undercover operations in Ukraine and the breakaway republic of Transnistria. Higgins and Grozev said that Mishkin was made a Hero of the Russian Federation by Putin in the autumn of 2014.

People familiar with his family believed it was awarded for activities “either in Crimea or in relation to (former Ukrainian president Viktor) Yanukovych”, according to their report. A popular uprising in Ukraine ousted the Moscow-backed Yanukovych, who fled the country in February 2014, and Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea a month later. The investigative group has previously identified GRU colonel Anatoly Chepiga as the other suspect behind the March poisoning attack and said that he too had received Russia’s highest award the same year in a secret ceremony in the Kremlin.

The two men are accused by British authorities of attempting to murder Skripal and his daughter Yulia with the Soviet-made nerve agent Novichok in the city of Salisbury in southwest England.

“The findings of this investigation by Bellingcat add possibly material context to the mission of the two GRU officers to Salisbury,” the report concluded. “The inclusion of a trained military doctor on the team implies that the purpose of the mission has been different than information gathering or other routine espionage activities.”

Using open-source records such as leaked residential, telephone and vehicle databases, the Bellingcat probe found Mishkin was born in the remote village of Loyga in northern Russia in 1979. He graduated in 2003 or 2004 from the Russian military’s medical academy in St Petersburg, where he specialized in “deep underwater physiology”. —AFP

SALISBURY: A handout picture taken on Fisherton Road in Salisbury shows Alexander Petrov (left) and Ruslan Boshirov, who are wanted by British police in connection with the nerve agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. —AFP