British Prime Minister Called Impossible to Reset British-Russian Relations

Boris Johnson said he was “wrong” allowing the restart of relations between Britain and Russia. The British Prime Minister linked the “terrible problems” in relations between London and Moscow with the poisoning of the Skripals. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was mistaken in allowing the possibility for relations between London and Moscow to be reset. “I am very, very disappointed,” the British The Spectator magazine quoted the politician on Monday, December 23. According to the head of government, he “really thought” that relations between the two countries “could be started again”, but he “was wrong.” At the same time, Johnson called Russia “a great country we fought with against fascism.” “Terrible problems” in relations between London and Moscow are connected with the poisoning of the former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in British Salisbury, Johnson said a few days earlier in an interview with the Estonian ERR portal. They were poisoned in March 2018. According to investigators, the poison – the Novichok nerve agent – was smeared on the door handle of ex-double agent’s house in Salisbury. After a long treatment, the Skripals left the hospital, and their current place of stay is kept secret. In June, British citizens Charlie Rowley and his common-law wife Dawn Sturgess were hospitalized in Amesbury. It was later established that they were poisoned with the same substance as the Skripals. A few days later Sturgess died. The Russian side denies involvement in both incidents. London accused the alleged employees of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (former GRU), Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, of the crime. The investigation indicated that their names may be fictitious. Later, a third suspect appeared in the case – a representative of Russian military intelligence who arrived in the UK with a passport in the name of Sergey Fedotov.  The investigation teams of Bellingcat, The Insider, Conflict Intelligence Team, and “Project” learned the details from the biographies of Boshirov, Petrov, and Fedotov and told their real names: Anatoly Chepiga, Alexander Mishkin, and Denis Sergeev. DW