# Skripal Poisoning The attempted murder on March 4, 2018, of Sergei Skripal — a former GRU officer who had spied for Britain and been released in a 2010 spy swap — and his daughter Yulia, with the nerve agent [[Novichok]], in Salisbury, England. Both survived. Four months later a discarded perfume bottle containing the agent killed a local woman, Dawn Sturgess. The attackers were officers of the [[GRU]]'s assassination unit, identified by [[Bellingcat]]; a British inquiry concluded in December 2025 that the operation "must have been authorised at the highest level, by President Putin." ## Timeline | Date | Event | |---|---| | Mar 4, 2018 | Sergei and Yulia Skripal found unconscious on a bench; a police detective, Nick Bailey, is also poisoned | | Mar 2018 | UK expels 23 Russian diplomats. On March 26 the U.S. expels **60** and closes the Seattle consulate; 17 EU states expel 34. Eventually about 150 are expelled from more than two dozen countries | | Apr 12, 2018 | The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirms a Novichok agent (the specific variant is in its classified report) | | June 30 / July 8, 2018 | Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley exposed via the perfume bottle; Sturgess dies | | Aug 2018 | Secretary of State [[Mike Pompeo]] determines Russia used a chemical weapon; U.S. sanctions follow in two rounds (2018, 2019) | | Sept 5–13, 2018 | UK names suspects "Petrov" and "Boshirov"; they appear on [[RT]] with editor [[Margarita Simonyan]] claiming they visited Salisbury to see its cathedral | | Sept–Oct 2018 | Bellingcat and The Insider identify "Boshirov" as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga and "Petrov" as GRU doctor Alexander Mishkin, both of **[[Unit 29155]]** — also linked to a 2015 poisoning in Bulgaria and a 2014 arms-depot explosion in the Czech Republic | | Sept 2021 | UK authorizes charges against a third GRU officer | | Dec 4, 2025 | The Dawn Sturgess Inquiry (Lord Hughes) finds Putin bears "moral responsibility" for her death and calls the use of the agent "astonishingly reckless"; the UK sanctions the GRU and eight officers the same day | ## The Trump administration's response The record cuts both ways. The first Trump administration carried out the largest U.S. expulsion of Russian diplomats in history and imposed two rounds of chemical-weapons sanctions. At the same time, *The Washington Post* reported Trump was furious that France and Germany had expelled far fewer — angry, in that account, at the size of the U.S. response rather than at Moscow. ## Why it matters here Skripal is [[Alexander Litvinenko]] repeated with a nerve agent: a state weapon, a state unit, a killing attempt on NATO soil, and a denial performed on the state broadcaster. The RT "tourist" interview ties Russia's state media directly to covering a GRU operation. See [[Kremlin Disinformation]]. ## See Also - [[Alexander Litvinenko]] · [[Novichok]] · [[Chemical Weapons Convention]] - [[GRU]] · [[Bellingcat]] · [[RT]] · [[Margarita Simonyan]] - [[Kremlin Disinformation]] · [[Active Measures]]