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Vladimir Putin is “morally responsible” for the death of a British woman killed after she sprayed herself with a nerve agent smuggled into the UK by Russian agents to assassinate a former spy, an inquiry has concluded.
Lord Hughes of Ombersley, the chair of the inquiry, said the assassination attempt on the former spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in March 2018 must have been authorised by Putin.
He said he was sure the Russian men took the fake perfume bottle containing the nerve agent novichok that killed Dawn Sturgess to Wiltshire and left it in Salisbury after the attempted hit on Skripal, which he described as “an astonishingly reckless act”.
Hughes said the evidence that it was a Russian state attack was “overwhelming”. He called it a “public demonstration of Russian state power for both international and domestic impact”.
The chair said Alexander Petrov, Ruslan Boshirov and Sergey Fedotov (all aliases) were members of an operational team within the GRU – the Russian military intelligence agency responsible for foreign intelligence gathering.
He concluded: “I am sure that in conducting their attack on Sergei Skripal, they were acting on instructions. I have concluded that the operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal must have been authorised at the highest level, by President Putin.
“I conclude that all those involved in the assassination attempt (not only Petrov, Boshirov and Fedotov but also those who sent them, and anyone else giving authorisation or knowing assistance in Russia or elsewhere) were morally responsible for Dawn Sturgess’s death.
“Deploying a highly toxic nerve agent in a busy city was an astonishingly reckless act. The risk that others beyond the intended target might be killed or injured was entirely foreseeable. The risk was dramatically magnified by leaving in the city a bottle of novichok disguised as perfume.”
On 4 March 2018, Skripal and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, were poisoned by novichok at his home in Salisbury, where he had been settled in a suburban cul-de-sac after a spy exchange. The Skripals fell seriously ill but survived.
Sturgess, 44, died after spraying novichok over herself stored in a fake perfume bottle at the home of her boyfriend, Charlie Rowley, in Amesbury, Wiltshire, seven miles north of Salisbury, on 30 June 2018.
Hughes said the three Russian operatives had arrived in London from Moscow on Friday 2 March with the intention of killing Skripal. He said on Sunday 4 March, Petrov and Boshirov placed novichok on the handle of Skripal’s front door.
Hughes said: “I am sure Petrov and Boshirov brought with them to Salisbury the ‘Nina Ricci’ bottle containing novichok made in Russia that was subsequently responsible for Dawn Sturgess’ death. It was probably this bottle that they used to apply poison to the door handle of Sergei Skripal’s house.
“They recklessly discarded this bottle somewhere public or semi-public before leaving Salisbury. They can have had no regard for the hazard thus created, of the death of, or serious injury to, an unaccountable number of innocent people.”
Rowley has said that he found the bottle in a bin shortly before he gave it to Sturgess, but Hughe said it was “likely” he had come upon the bottle “within a few days” of it being abandoned on 4 March.
The chair said: “There is a clear causative link between the use and discarding of the novichok by Petrov and Boshirov and the death of Dawn Sturgess.”
Hughes said he had considered whether the British state ought to have taken steps that could have prevented the Wiltshire poisonings.
He concluded that there had been failings in Skripal’s management as an exchanged prisoner. “In particular, sufficient, regular written assessments were not conducted,” he said. But he said that the assessment by the state that Skripal was not at significant risk of assassination could not be judged to have been unreasonable.
He also said he did not consider that the attack on Skripal could have been avoided by additional security measures being put in place. “The only such measures which could have avoided the attack would have been such as to hide him completely with a new identity.”
Hughes said that, after the Salisbury attack, extra training for emergency services on recognising symptoms nerve agent exposure should have been more widely circulated. In addition, he criticised Wiltshire police for wrongly characterising Sturgess as a drugs user after she was poisoned.
The chair concluded it was reasonable that public health officials had not given the public advice not to pick anything up, because at that stage it was not known where the Russian agents had been.
Hughes said he was satisfied that Sturgess had received “entirely appropriate medical care” from the ambulance staff who attended to her and from hospital doctors.
He said: “It is absolutely clear that her condition was in fact unsurvivable from a very early stage – before the time the ambulance crew arrived to treat her. This was a result of the very serious brain injury that was itself the consequence of her heart stopping for an extended period of 30 minutes or so immediately after she was poisoned.”
Public hearings took place in Salisbury and London between 14 October and 2 December 2024. A series of hearings took place behind closed doors earlier this year so that highly sensitive information could be put before the chair. The inquiry has cost £8.3m.
