Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal
Who were Sergei and Yulia Skripal?
What happened to Sergei and Yulia Skripal in March 2018?
What was the international response to the Skripal poisoning?
What is Novichok?
In March 2018 former Russian spy Sergei Skripal went out to lunch with his daughter Yulia, who had come to England from Moscow to visit her father. Shortly thereafter the pair was found unconscious on a park bench. They had both been poisoned with the Russian-developed nerve agent Novichok; Sergei Skripal, who allegedly served as a double agent for the United Kingdom in the 1990s, was the likely target of what would become an international incident.
Both Skripals spent weeks in hospital in critical condition. The British government accused the Kremlin of trying to murder them, though Vladimir Putin’s administration denied having any involvement. In response to the incident, Russian intelligence officers were expelled from the United Kingdom and then from many other western countries.
Skripal’s background
Skripal, a Russian native, had a long career in his home country’s intelligence service. He fought in Afghanistan when the then-Soviet Union invaded in 1979, and he was apparently recruited by the GRU, Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency, while he was later attending a military academy in Moscow. He served twice in Europe, first in the 1980s and again in the ’90s, working under diplomatic cover.
It has been alleged by Russian prosecutors that during his second posting, in about 1995, Skripal was approached by British intelligence, and he agreed to provide the identities of Russian undercover operatives in exchange for roughly $100,000 in cash.
He quit the GRU in either 1999 or 2000—on account of corruption, his friends told the BBC—and then reportedly went to work for Boris Gromov, a former Soviet military commander. In 2004, Skripal was arrested on charges of treason. He was convicted and sentenced to 13 years in a labor camp. But in 2010 he was released as part of a major spy swap between Russia and the United States. He and his wife, Lyudmilla, moved to Salisbury, England, a quaint medieval town of 40,000, just eight miles from Stonehenge. Lyudmila Skripal died of cancer in 2012.
The poisoning
In March 2018 Skripal’s daughter Yulia, who was 33, was visiting from Moscow. On Sunday, March 4, the pair went to a pub and then to an Italian restaurant. Forty minutes after they left the restaurant, emergency services received a report about two people lying unconscious on a park bench. One witness told the BBC that Yulia was frothing at the mouth, with her eyes “wide open but completely white.” They were rushed to Salisbury District Hospital, where they were both listed in critical condition. Yulia Skripal was released in early April, but her father remained hospitalized until May 18. A detective who was at the scene was also hospitalized for more than two weeks.
British officials later announced that the Skripals had apparently been poisoned with Novichok, a group of deadly nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ’80s and designed to be especially lethal and largely undetectable. Detectives said the pair evidently came into contact with the poison, which can come in the form of liquid, powder, or aerosol, at the front door of their home; but traces of it were also found at the pub and the restaurant they visited before they collapsed. Up to 500 people who visited those establishments were told to wash their clothes and belongings. Sergei Skripal’s home, the area surrounding the bench where the pair was found, the home of a detective who fell ill, and two ambulance stations had to be decontaminated, along with the restaurant and pub.
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Other victims and fallout
Dawn Sturgess, a 44-year-old mother of three who lived in a town nearby, died four months later, after being exposed to the same nerve agent. Police said that her partner had picked up a perfume bottle that contained the agent somewhere in Salisbury and given it to Sturgess as a gift. She sprayed it on her wrist and fell ill within 15 minutes. Her partner was also hospitalized but survived.
This all occurred at a time when relations between Russia and NATO countries were especially tense, in part because of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and conflict with Ukraine, as well as reports of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The British accused Putin’s government of attempted murder, and it expelled every suspected Russian intelligence officer working as a diplomat in the United Kingdom—23 people in total. Many other countries followed its lead, with the United States expelling 60 people. It was a much harsher response than the one taken in 2006, when another former Russian intelligence officer, Alexander Litvinenko, was apparently fatally poisoned at a London hotel. In a 2019 meeting British Prime Minister Theresa May reportedly told Putin the Skripal poisoning was a “truly despicable act.” Putin, however, maintained his government’s innocence. He said shortly after the poisoning that “if a military-grade nerve agent had been used…the man would have died on the spot.”
In August 2020 Russian dissident Alexei Navalny became seriously ill on a flight to Moscow, and tests later confirmed that he had been exposed to Novichok. Fearing for his safety in a Russian hospital, Navalny’s family had him flown to Berlin. He recovered but died in a Russian prison in 2024, likely the result of a different type of poison.