British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson says it's 'overwhelmingly likely' Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the use of a nerve agent against a former spy in the English city of Salisbury.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson says it's "overwhelmingly likely" Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the use of a nerve agent against a former spy in the English city of Salisbury.
Prime Minister Theresa May has said it's "highly likely" the Kremlin is responsible for the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
But Johnson went a step further and blamed Putin directly on Friday.
He said "our quarrel is with Putin's Kremlin, and with his decision, and we think it overwhelmingly likely that it was his decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the UK, on the streets of Europe, for the first time since the Second World War."
Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, have been in hospital in a critical condition since March 4 when they were found unconscious on a bench outside a shopping centre in the southern English cathedral city of Salisbury.
Prime Minister Theresa May said it was "highly likely" Moscow was to blame after Britain identified the substance as part of the Novichok group of nerve agents which were developed by the Soviet military during the 1970s and 1980s.
"It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia," May said.
"Either this was a direct act by the Russian state against our country. Or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others."
Russia has denied any involvement, cast Britain as a post-colonial power unsettled by Brexit, and even suggested London had fabricated the attack in an attempt to whip up anti-Russian hysteria.
President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB spy who is poised to win a fourth term in an election on Sunday, has so far only said publicly that Britain should get to the bottom of what has happened.
(With Reuters and PTI inputs)
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