Plausible Denial
Dossiers

The Salisbury Novichok Attack

2018-03-04

The 4 March 2018 attempted assassination of former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, with a Novichok-class nerve agent — and the subsequent identification of GRU Unit 29155.

Background

Sergei Skripal was a former colonel of the Soviet and Russian military-intelligence service GRU who had been recruited in the 1990s by the British Secret Intelligence Service. He provided intelligence to SIS across the latter half of the 1990s and into the 2000s, including identifying a substantial number of GRU officers operating abroad under diplomatic and other cover. He was arrested in Moscow in December 2004, charged with treason, and convicted in August 2006 to thirteen years' imprisonment in a Russian penal colony.1

Skripal was one of four individuals released by the Russian Federation in the July 2010 Vienna prisoner exchange — the largest US-Russia spy exchange of the post-Cold War period — alongside Igor Sutyagin, Alexander Zaporozhsky, and Gennady Vasilenko, in exchange for the ten Russian SVR illegals arrested by the FBI in the United States in June 2010 (the so-called Anna Chapman group). Skripal was settled in Salisbury, Wiltshire, with his daughter Yulia visiting him from her residence in Moscow.2

The Operation

On 4 March 2018 a Sunday afternoon, Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found unconscious on a public bench in Salisbury city centre, near the Maltings shopping arcade. Both were transported to Salisbury District Hospital in critical condition. Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who attended the scene and entered Skripal's home, also became seriously ill. The Skripals had been poisoned with a nerve agent of the Novichok family — specifically, a variant subsequently identified by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons as A-234.3

The investigation, led by the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command (SO15) and supported by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, identified the route of administration as the door handle of the Skripal residence. Forensic analysis identified the nerve agent's delivery vehicle as a Nina Ricci "Premier Jour" perfume bottle that had been adapted for the operation.4

On 30 June 2018, four months after the original attack, a British couple — Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess — were exposed to Novichok in Amesbury, eight miles from Salisbury, after Rowley found and gave to Sturgess a perfume bottle that had been discarded in a charity collection bin. Dawn Sturgess died on 8 July 2018; Rowley survived after several weeks of intensive treatment. The bottle was forensically confirmed as the original delivery vehicle for the Salisbury attack.5

Disclosure

On 14 March 2018 — ten days after the Salisbury attack — Prime Minister Theresa May announced to the House of Commons that the British Government had concluded that the Russian Federation was responsible for the attack. The attribution was supported by intelligence-community assessment, by the OPCW's confirmation of the Novichok identification, and by the British Government's institutional knowledge of the Russian Federation's chemical-weapons programme. The United Kingdom expelled 23 Russian diplomats; in coordinated allied action, more than 150 Russian diplomats were expelled by NATO and EU member states in the largest coordinated expulsion of the post-Cold War period.6

The named operatives — initially identified by the Metropolitan Police as "Aleksandr Petrov" and "Ruslan Boshirov" travelling on Russian passports — were progressively identified by Bellingcat, in collaboration with The Insider and Der Spiegel, as Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin. Chepiga, identified in September 2018, was a Colonel of the Russian Armed Forces and a recipient of the Hero of the Russian Federation award. Mishkin, identified in October 2018, was a Russian military doctor.7

A third operative — initially identified by Bellingcat as "Sergey Fedotov" — was subsequently identified as Denis Sergeev, a Major-General of the Russian Armed Forces. Sergeev had been present in London and had travelled to Salisbury in advance of the operation; his role has been characterised in subsequent reporting as that of operational commander. The three operatives were identified by Bellingcat as members of GRU Unit 29155 — a previously little-known special-operations unit of the Russian military-intelligence service.8

The post-event chain of disclosures expanded the public-record account of GRU Unit 29155. Subsequent investigations by Bellingcat, The Insider, Der Spiegel, New York Times, BBC, and other outlets identified Unit 29155 as the unit responsible for a pattern of foreign direct-action operations including the 2014 Vrbětice ammunition-depot explosions in the Czech Republic; the 2015 attempted poisoning of Bulgarian arms dealer Emiliyan Gebrev; the 2018 disrupted Spanish-coup plot against Montenegrin parliament members; and a substantial set of additional operations across Western Europe and beyond. The Czech Government in April 2021 formally attributed the Vrbětice explosions to Unit 29155 and expelled eighteen Russian diplomats.9

The Dawn Sturgess Inquiry, established as a public inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 in the wake of an earlier inquest, began hearings in October 2024 under chair Lord Anthony Hughes of Ombersley. The Inquiry has been characterised as the most comprehensive public examination of the Salisbury attack in the United Kingdom.10

Legacy

The Salisbury attack has functioned, since 2018, as a load-bearing reference for the question of state-intelligence-service responsibility in the use of weapons of mass destruction on the territory of partner states, and for the question of how Western governments and institutions should respond to such operations. The attack was the second documented post-Soviet Russian intelligence-service operation to use radiological or chemical material on UK territory, after the November 2006 polonium-210 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.11

The case produced one of the most consequential single sets of Western government attribution actions on record. The combination of the UK's specific identification of GRU Unit 29155, the OPCW's chemical-attribution work, the Bellingcat-led open-source identification of named operatives, and the Czech Government's parallel attribution work for Vrbětice together established a public-record account of GRU foreign direct-action capability without close parallel. The Russian Federation has consistently denied the attribution.12

For the broader question of cross-jurisdictional intelligence work, the case has been characterised as a paradigmatic example of the post-2010 fusion of state intelligence and open-source-investigative work. Bellingcat's identifications of Chepiga, Mishkin, and Sergeev relied substantially on commercial Russian-government databases, on social-media corroboration, and on the patient reconstruction of travel records — an investigative methodology that has subsequently been substantially adopted by Western intelligence services and journalism.13

This dossier relates directly to the Main Directorate (GRU/GU) of the Russian General Staff — specifically Unit 29155 — and to the Secret Intelligence Service, which had originally recruited Skripal, and to the Security Service (MI5), which led the post-event domestic counter-intelligence response in coordination with the Metropolitan Police. The country-level context is on the pages for Russia and the United Kingdom.

Sources & Further Reading

  1. Mark Urban, The Skripal Files: The Life and Near Death of a Russian Spy (Henry Holt, 2018).
  2. Department of Justice press release on the Vienna exchange, 8 July 2010; FBI Operation Ghost Stories case file declassified summary, 2011.
  3. UK Government statement on Salisbury attribution, 14 March 2018; OPCW, Summary of the Report on Activities Carried Out in Support of a Request for Technical Assistance by the United Kingdom, S/1612/2018, 12 April 2018.
  4. Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command, Salisbury investigation update; Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Porton Down, scientific findings.
  5. Wiltshire Police statements on the Amesbury exposure, 30 June – 8 July 2018; Counter Terrorism Command statements on the Sturgess case.
  6. UK Government statement, "Salisbury attack: PM Theresa May's response," 14 March 2018; House of Commons Hansard, 14 March 2018; coordinated NATO and EU expulsion announcements, 26 March 2018.
  7. Bellingcat / Insider / Der Spiegel investigative series; Bellingcat, "Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga," 26 September 2018; "Full Report: Skripal Poisoning Suspect Dr. Alexander Mishkin, Hero of Russia," 9 October 2018.
  8. Bellingcat, "Third Suspect in Skripal Poisoning Identified as Denis Sergeev, High-Ranking GRU Officer," 14 February 2019.
  9. Statement of the Government of the Czech Republic on the Vrbětice case, 17 April 2021; Michael Schwirtz, "Top Secret Russian Unit Seeks to Destabilize Europe," New York Times, 8 October 2019.
  10. Dawn Sturgess Inquiry, hearings opened October 2024.
  11. Sir Robert Owen, The Litvinenko Inquiry: Report into the Death of Alexander Litvinenko, HC 695, 21 January 2016.
  12. Russian Foreign Ministry statements on the Salisbury attribution, March 2018 onward; Vladimir Putin press-conference statements.
  13. Eliot Higgins, We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People (Bloomsbury, 2021).