Skripal girl was in UK to ask dad for blessing on wedding
Revealed: Novichok victim planned to start family with boyfriend
YULIA Skripal was in Britain to ask for her father’s blessing for her to marry her long-term boyfriend when she was poisoned by Russian agents with novichok, it was reported yesterday.
Miss Skripal, 33, had sold her father’s former Moscow apartment and bought a two-bedroom flat on the sixth-floor of a high-rise block in the west of the Russian capital.
She was hoping to settle down in the flat with her partner Stepan Vikeev, 30, and their two dogs.
She had even commissioned work to turn one of the smaller rooms into a nursery as she planned to start a family with Mr Vikeev, according to her chief renovator Diana Petik.
Knowing that her father Sergei could not safely travel to Russia for the wedding, she boarded an Aeroflot flight to London on March 3 before travelling to Salisbury, Wiltshire, to deliver the happy news and request his blessing.
The next afternoon, the pair collapsed in Salisbury city centre after being exposed to novichok which had been smeared on Mr Skripal’s front door.
The latest details over Miss Skripal’s reasons for travelling to the UK in March emerged in a New York Times article published yesterday.
Miss Skripal was said to have been engaged to Mr Vikeev, who allegedly works for a clandestine company called the Institute of Modern Security Problems, part of Russia’s notorious FSB intelligence service.
The organisation is run by his mother Tatiana, 61, and is said to be an integral part of the FSB, which
‘Planted as a honey trap’
replaced the KGB following the demise of the Soviet Union. The Skripals are believed to have been poisoned by two assassins who belonged to another arm of Russian spy community, the military intelligence agency known as the GRU.
Mr Vikeev has made no contact with Miss Skripal and her family since the attack and he and his mother are said to have gone into hiding under the protection of Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s agents.
There are rumours that Mr Vikeev may even have been planted as a ‘honey trap’ to keep an eye on the Skripals after Mr Skripal was sent to the UK in a spy swap in 2010.
Mr Skripal reportedly expressed that he had reservations about Mr Vikeev, although the reasons for this are unknown.
Similarly, Mrs Vikeev was said to have disapproved of her son’s relationship with Miss Skripal because she considered her double-agent father to be a traitor.
Yesterday’s revelations came as new photographs emerged showing a younger Mr Skripal posing with his daughter in the late 1980s and his late wife Lyudmila in 1972.
The three were also photographed at a school graduation in 2001, when Mr Skripal was still working as a spy for the GRU.
The New York Times article also reported new claims that Mr Skripal may have been targeted because of his extensive work travelling around Europe to deliver lectures on the GRU to European and American intelligence workers.
He had made repeated trips to the CNI, Spain’s spy service, as well as similar organisations in Estonia and the Czech Republic on assignments organised by MI6.
Aleksei A Venediktov, editor in chief of the Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy, said it was possible the Russian government thought he was passing on sensitive information, even though British spies shrugged off his lectures as largely unremarkable.
Sergei and Yuila Skripal, who spent weeks in hospital after the novichok attack are currently under police protection at a secret safehouse in Britain.