A spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the poisoning attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in the United Kingdom that it was a "tragicomic" date because after all that time London had failed to provide Moscow with an adequate narrative of what had happened that day
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 04th March, 2019) A spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the poisoning attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in the United Kingdom that it was a "tragicomic" date because after all that time London had failed to provide Moscow with an adequate narrative of what had happened that day.
"This is a tragicomic anniversary. We still do not know what happened to the Skripals. We have seen Yulia Skripal once or twice on camera. And there has been a sort of a statement and her fragmentary words over the phone. And that is it. No one has seen [Sergei] Skripal himself," Zakharova said in an interview with the Russian Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, released early on Monday.
The spokeswoman recalled that UK authorities had not provided Moscow with the most basic information that should be gathered in cases like this � the time line of the attack and the actions of the people involved.
The former double agent and his daughter were found unconscious on a bench near a shopping mall in the southwestern UK city of Salisbury on March 4, 2018. London has claimed that the two were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent A234, also known as a Novichok agent, and blamed the attack on Russian intelligence services.
Despite London's allegations and sanctions pressure, the Kremlin has repeatedly dismissed the claims about Russia's involvement in the attack and stressed that Moscow has been denied access both to the investigation into the incident and to the Russian nationals.
Although both Sergei and Yulia Skripal are claimed to have recovered from the attack, Russian diplomats working in the United Kingdom say that no one has personally seen them since last March and the fate of the Russian nationals therefore remains unknown.
