I have a personal grudge against Vladimir Putin

 I have a personal grudge against Vladimir Putin since the deadly  actions of his agents in Salisbury in March 2018 impacted directly on my life and that of thousands of my fellow residents in the Wiltshire city and its environs.

As retired Judge Lord Hughes of Ombersley’s  long awaited report into the death of Dawn Sturgess – the 44-year old mother of three killed by the Novichok nerve agent discarded by Putin’s spies makes clear – the Russian President bears a “moral responsibility” for her tragic death.

For there is little doubt that it was Putin’s direct orders that sent the spies Ruslan Borishov and Alexander Petrov to the city on their murderous mission, not – as they ludicrously maintained – to admire the spire of its famous cathedral, but to wreak a savage revenge against former double agent Sergei Skripal. In doing so, as the Hughes report underlines, they endangered the lives not only of their intended victim Skripal and his daughter Yulia, but those of thousands of innocents like Sturgess and the detective sergeant Nick Bailey who also fell ill after coming into contact with the deadly Novichok that they left behind.

Putin himself has made little secret of what “traitors” like Skripal can expect for betraying Russia. Two recent victims of such poisons, who like Skripal miraculously survived the attacks, were the anti-Putin political leader Alexei Navalny and former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, whose face was permanently disfigured in 2004 after he was poisoned by dioxin, also supplied courtesy of Moscow centre.

Navalny only survived the poisoning thanks to expert hospital care in Germany, but when he returned to Russia after recovering in 2021, he was immediately arrested, jailed, and done to death in one of Putin’s prisons in February last year. Another victim of Putin’s vicious vengeance was the exiled dissident former intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died slowly in hospital from polonium poisoning in 2006, ingested when he took tea with a Putin emissary in a London hotel.

In 2018 I was working in Salisbury as a guide for a history tours company. On the very day that Putin’s goons were photographed passing through Salisbury rail station with their deadly bottle of Novichok I followed them through the barrier a couple of hours later. The spies smeared the lethal substance on the doorknob of the house where Skripal had been living quietly since he had been freed from a Russian jail in a spy swap in 2010. Skripal had been recruited as a double agent by MI6 in 1995 while spying for Russia in Spain. Probably Britain’s most important agent inside Russian intelligence since the late Oleg Gordievsky in the 1980s, Skripal was given a 13 year jail sentence for high treason when he was exposed by the Russians in 2004.

After the swap Skripal must have thought he was safe living in sleepy Salisbury, but eight years after he arrived in Britain Putin’s avengers came calling. We don’t know what triggered their fatal visit, but local rumour had it that Skripal often met his MI6 minder in Salisbury’s Cote Brasserie French restaurant where I too was a regular (their steaks are excellent) and Moscow may have thought that their retired renegade agent was still active in the spying game.

What happened next in Salisbury came straight out of a spy thriller: Sergei and Yulia were found semi-conscious on a park bench and the whole city was plunged into a pre-Covid lockdown as scientists from the nearby Porton Down biological and chemical warfare research centre patrolled the city clad in their Dr Who style anti nerve agent space suits. Businesses went bust, the streets were eerily deserted and rumour ran riot as the Skripals hovered between life and death in Salisbury Hospital. They were the hospital’s most illustrious patients since Madonna was treated there after falling from the horse she had been given by Trudy Styler, Sting’s wife and a celebrity local resident.

The Skripals recovered, and are now living anonymously in another country, and Salisbury slowly returned to its usual slumbering equilibrium. But three months later in June a man named Charlie Rowley found what appeared to be a bottle of Nina Ricci Premier Jour perfume. He took the find back to his home in Amesbury and presented it to his partner Dawn, who sprayed herself with the contents. Within minutes she collapsed “foaming at the mouth” and fell into a coma, dying eight days later without recovering consciousness.

When the red carpet is rolled out for Vladimir Putin at his next Ukraine peace summit with Donald Trump, spare a thought for Dawn Sturgess and the countless others who have died horribly at his behest.