‘Traitors will kick the
Robert Mendick, Ben Farmer, and Gordon Rayner
President Vladimir Putin once vowed to kill the Russian double agent who was poisoned on British soil and has been left fighting for his life.
The Russian President issued the death threat that “traitors will kick the bucket” as Colonel Sergei Skripal, who was convicted of working for MI6, was being sent to the UK in 2010. Skripal was paid US$100,000 by MI6 to pass details of Russian agents. He was jailed but released in exchange for Russian spies.
Putin said in a television interview at the time: “Traitors will kick the bucket. Trust me. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.”
The emergence of Putin’s warning will reinforce the increasing belief of ministers that the attack on Skripal on British soil was a ‘state-sponsored’ assassination attempt and perpetrated by the Russian intelligence agency, the FSB. The Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit took control of the investigation from the local Wiltshire force.
It came amid rising diplomatic tensions between Moscow and London as Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, threatened fresh sanctions against Russia. The Home Secretary was today to chair a meeting of COBR to discuss the growing crisis.
Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia Skripal, 33, remain in intensive care fighting for their lives after they were exposed to an “unknown substance” as they sat on a bench outside a shopping centre in Salisbury in Wiltshire.
Police and intelligence agencies are seeking to understand why Skripal was targeted, seven years on from the spy exchange in 2010. One motive is a possible link between Skripal and Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent, who compiled a notorious dossier detailing alleged corruption involving US President Donald Trump and the Kremlin.
Skripal was recruited by MI6 in the 1990s while a senior officer in the Russian military’s GRU intelligence unit when Steele ran the MI6 desk in Moscow. Professor Anthony Glees, director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, said: “If it is the case that Christopher Steele produced a dossier on Trump that is authentic and accurate, as we believe it to be — its accuracy has not been seriously undermined — then anybody who feels that Trump was humiliated and dissed by an MI6 officer may feel that getting at one of his agents is justified. That could be the Russian security services.”
The Russian Embassy in London issued a statement accusing the British authorities of the “demonisation of Russia”.
But one senior intelligence source said that it bore all the hallmarks of the Russian state intelligence agency the FSB.
“This looks very much like an FSB hit,” said the source, adding: “For Putin, revenge is a dish served cold. This man betrayed the Russian security service and they do very nasty things to such people.”
A relative of Colonel Skripal has said he knew he would not escape his past that easily, and told BBC Russia: “From the first day he knew it would end badly, and that he would not be left alone.”