UK sanctions Russia after investigation finds Putin responsible for nerve agent attack on British soil

London – The British government announced new sanctions against Russia on Thursday and summoned the country’s top diplomat in London “to respond to Russia’s ongoing campaign of hostile activity against the United Kingdom” after an investigation found that Russian President Vladimir Putin was responsible for a 2018 poison attack that killed an innocent woman in England.

The new sanctions specifically target the Russian military intelligence agency GRU, which Britain has long accused of carrying out the attack on a former Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal, with the nerve agent Novichok. Skripal and his daughter became seriously ill from the poisoning, along with a British police officer, but the only person who died was innocent bystander Dawn Sturgess.

“GRU agents are carrying out Putin’s orders, seeking to destabilize Ukraine and attempting to sow chaos and disorder across Europe,” the UK government said in a statement.

An inquest was set up to investigate the death of Sturgess, who collapsed in Wiltshire, England, after applying a substance she believed to be perfume, but which was actually a bottle of Novichok left by the perpetrators of the attack.

Shortly after the inquiry began its work, “it became clear that his death could not be adequately understood without also investigating the earlier nerve agent event in Salisbury,” a nearby town where Skripal was attacked, according to the inquiry’s final report, which was published Thursday. “There have been no other known cases of Novichok poisoning in the UK, nor have there been any since.”

Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer whom Russian authorities accused of spying for Britain, had defected to the United Kingdom. He was found a few months before Sturgess’s death, collapsed on a bench in Salisbury next to his unconscious daughter. It was determined that both had been poisoned with Novichok.

The bottle Sturgess found and believed to contain perfume was used in the attack on Skripal, probably applied to the handle of his front door, the investigation concluded, and was brought to the UK from Russia by Russian GRU agents.

GRU officers then “recklessly discarded this bottle in some public or semi-public place before leaving Salisbury on Sunday, March 4,” according to the investigation report. “They cannot have taken into account the danger thus created, of death or serious injury to countless numbers of innocent people.”

Sturgess’ boyfriend later found the bottle and gave it to her as a gift, according to the report. She applied what she believed to be her gifted perfume and then died.

“I have concluded that the operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal must have been authorized at the highest level, by President Putin,” the leader of the inquiry, former UK Supreme Court judge Anthony Hughes, said in the report. “I therefore conclude that everyone involved in the attempted murder… was morally responsible for the death of Dawn Sturgess.”

In a statement announcing the new sanctions, the UK government said the GRU “intends to carry out hybrid operationsincluding the use of cyberattacks and the spread of disinformation intended to cause devastating real-world consequences, as well as recruiting criminal proxies to do their dirty work.”

“The UK will always stand up to Putin’s brutal regime and expose its killing machine for what it is. Today’s sanctions are the latest step in our unwavering defense of European security, as we continue to squeeze Russia’s finances and strengthen Ukraine’s position at the negotiating table,” UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in the statement.

The UK will continue to work closely with its allies to “counter Russia’s attempts to destabilize our societies”, according to the statement.