Putin personally ordered Salisbury poisoning, UK believes

LONDON — Vladimir Putin personally authorized the Salisbury poisoning of a former Russian spy on U.K. soil, the British government’s top Russia official said Thursday. 

Jonathan Allen, who is the government’s most senior official responsible for Russia policy, told the inquiry into the 2018 poisonings that the use of nerve agent Novichok could not have been the work of a “rogue” Russian intelligence cell — and pointed the finger squarely at the Russian president.

Speaking at the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry in London — named after the unconnected British woman who died amid the failed attempt on the life of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia in March 2018 — Allen said the decision to sanction the move “would have gone to President Putin.” 

Allen serves as director general of defense and intelligence at the U.K. Foreign Office.

He told the inquiry that the risks involved in using Novichok, the possession of which is prohibited under international conventions, in a NATO country are “so enormous” that it must have been sanctioned by the very top of the Russian security services and government.

Allen said the “highly bureaucratic” nature of the Russian state meant decisions such as whether to approve an assassination would have to be approved by the Putin personally. 

“Initiative is extremely discouraged,” he said, adding: “Critical thinking is not part of Russian education.”

Novichok stockpiles

During his mammoth three-hour evidence session on Thursday, Allen gave new details on the government’s assessment of the Russian security apparatus, and how the U.K. combatted attempts to discredit its reaction to the poisonings in 2018.

The inquiry, which held its final evidence session open to the public and journalists Thursday, has been held with stringent restrictions in place, meaning that reporting its contents is delayed by 10 minutes, and important national security questions are covered in closed sessions from next Monday. 

Allen told the inquiry that Novichok, also suspected of being used against late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a 2020 attempt on his life, had been stockpiled for over a decade prior the Salisbury attack for specific use against enemies of the Russian state. He said the weapons program which made it was initially set up under the Soviet Union. 

“It is not capable of being made by a non-state actor,” he said, adding that the high level of purity meant that it “need to be made in a highly sophisticated state-run laboratory.” 

Due to international agreements, there is an “absolute prohibition” on the use of chemical weapons, he pointed out, and Russia had failed to comply with a duty to reveal whether it has produced or owned any chemical agents.

Russia was required to destroy stocks of weapons that it had declared to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Novichok was not declared, and therefore not destroyed, Allen said.

Referring to the separate testimony of Peter Wilson, the permanent representative to the OPCW in 2018, Allen said the U.K. raised with the Russian Federation in 2000 the absence of Novichok from its declaration of weapons. Russia indicated at the time there was nothing to declare. 

The UK response 

The inquiry has also been probing the handling of the case by the British state itself.

Allen said the previous poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a defector from Russia’s security services, with the radioactive isotope Polonium-210 had shaped the U.K.’s response to Salisbury. 

“We learned from the Litvinenko experience, in which Russia played all sorts of games, dragged its feet, played with both the police investigation and ultimately the inquiry, pretending that it was going to cooperate and never doing so,” he said. “There was absolute clarity from the start that we were not going to let Russia string it out in the same way.” 

Then-British Prime Minister Theresa May moved swiftly in the days after the Salisbury incident to point the finger at Russia.

Allen said he believed the Skripal poisoning was not “intended to be entirely covert.” 

“It was meant to act as a warning, in my view, he said. “The Russian state would have expected the U.K. to put two and two together,” but would not have expected the speed of Britain’s international response. 

Dysfunctional Russian agencies

The inquiry shed light Thursday on the British government’s assessment of how Russia’s varied and sometimes competing intelligence agencies operate.

He pointed out that Litvinenko was a former FSB security services officer who killed by his old organization, while Skripal, a former GRU officer, was killed by his own former intelligence unit. “Perhaps that is a relevant pattern,” he said.  

He said the attempted assassination of Skripal by the GRU would “probably” not have been known about by Russia’s other intelligence agencies, and even Russian’s foreign ministry.

“There is quite often tension between organizations in the Russian state security services, they do not cooperate well, if at all,” Allen said. “The FSB and the SVR, the external agency, both rather also look down on the GRU and see it as rather reckless and sometimes a little unprofessional.” 

Tackling disinformation 

Detailing the communications between Britain and Russia in the immediate aftermath of Salisbury, Allen said Russia sent an “extraordinary number” of note verbale — formal diplomatic communications — to the U.K. “designed in part sort of try and overwhelm [us] a bit.” 

He said the denial-led Russian response to the incident was aimed at breathing life into conspiracy theories such as the idea that the poisonings were done by the U.K. to distract from Brexit, or to undermine the World Cup in Russia. 

“The Russians don’t really mind if anyone believes it fully, the point is that there’s doubt, and then that becomes a win for them in their minds,” he said. 

Allen said Putin’s personal comments about the assassination attempt were “extremely offensive and rather callous,” a view seemingly shared by Laurie Bristow, the U.K. ambassador to Russia between 2016 to 2020 who said in an email shown to the inquiry: “Perhaps VVP [Putin] should have quit while he was ahead.”