Russia’s Trail of Poison Another murder attempt in Britain of a former intelligence agent.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-trail-of-poison-1520467439
Another Russian agent in exile, another poisoning in England. Former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury on Sunday and are in critical condition. Mr. Skripal was a double agent for the British intelligence service MI6. He was sentenced to 13 years for spying, but he and other agents were exchanged in Vienna in 2010 for 10 Russian agents arrested in the U.S. The Skripals have been living openly in Britain.
Scotland Yard called the attack “a major incident involving attempted murder by administration of a nerve agent.” A police officer who found the Skripals fell seriously ill. The poisoning echoes the attack that killed Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006. A British inquiry concluded that the operation to slip polonium into his tea in a London hotel “was probably approved’’ by Vladimir Putin. Yet Britain made only modest protests, and the accused killers, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, remain at large in Russia despite British demands for extradition.
The obvious suspicion is that the Russians wanted Mr. Skripal dead, and his son and brother have died in unexplained circumstances in the last two years. Mr. Putin is a former KGB agent, so you can draw your own conclusions about the role of the Kremlin. As a demonstration of Russian ruthlessness, the poisoning is more evidence of the nature of the Moscow regime.
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