Hossen Sohel: The two men accused by the UK of carrying out a nerve agent attack in Salisbury have been identified and are civilians, not criminals, Vladimir Putin has said, reports The guardian.
The Russian president said Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov may soon make appearances in the media to protest their innocence. “These are civilians,” Putin said in remarks reported by Russian news agencies. “There is nothing criminal here.”
British officials have said the men were agents of Russian military intelligence dispatched to kill Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy who had given information to British intelligence. He was imprisoned in Russia before being released in a spy swap in 2010.
Speaking at an economic forum in the eastern Russian city of Vladivostok, Putin appeared to deny that the men worked for Russia’s military intelligence service the Main Directorate, commonly called the GRU.
British officials this month charged the two men in absentia with the attempted murder with novichok of Sergei Skripal, his daughter Yulia and a policeman who investigated the scene. Scotland Yard released CCTV images of the two suspects at Salisbury train station on the day of the attack.
Putin called on the two men to appear in media to protest their innocence, saying he “wanted to address them directly”.
His intervention risks widening the gulf between Russia and the UK over the attempted assassination, which triggered a wave of diplomatic expulsions by both sides. After the incident on 4 March, the UK and more than two dozen other countries expelled a total of 150 Russian spies who were working under diplomatic cover. Russia kicked out a similar number of those countries’ envoys.