Mikhail Lyubinov was a master spy for the KGB during the Soviet era (Picture: east2west news)

The poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal was carried out by Western secret services to harm Vladimir Putin’s election this month, a former KGB agent has claimed.

Master spy Yuri Lyubimov headed the KGB’s UK desk after being thrown out of London in the 1960s for trying to recruit a woman in the Foreign Office.

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He rounded on claims that Moscow was behind the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter Yulia, and claims Boris Johnson’s reaction to the incident shows it’s a plot against Russia.

‘It is absurd to kill a person who had been swapped,’ he said.




‘If he was to carry any secrets on him, he could have been killed here (in Moscow) – calmly, quietly – to inject him with a dose and no one would have ever heard of it.

‘Secondly, and this is the main moment: who benefits from it?

Sergei Skripal would have been killed in Moscow if Russia was to blame, the ex-KGB agent claims (Picture: AP)

Boris Johnson’s reaction was ‘telling’, the former master spy said (Picture: EPA)

‘You’ve got to be an idiot to suddenly do this right before our presidential elections and in the middle of an horrendous anti-Russian campaign.’

He claimed Johnson’s reaction vowing sanctions and a World Cup boycott was telling.

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‘Boris Johnson’s statement confirms my thought – at a time when is it all still very unclear, already we receive a threat to boycott our football championship.’

Lyubimov said: ‘My conclusion is this: it has been done by Western secret service to splash oil on fire, to get this fire – which started for no single reason – going properly, and to help an attack on our country.’

He said the deaths of dissidents Alexander Litvinenko and Boris Berezovsky were equally suspicious, and were unfairly blamed on Moscow.

A police officer also fell ill after finding the pair slumped on a bench (Picture: Getty)

A forensic tent was put up over the bench in Salisbury (Picture: Getty)

‘All these murders, that wouldn’t happen anywhere else in the world,’ he said.

His own protege Oleg Gordievsky has been living safely in Britain for three decades after defecting from Russia, he said.

Other defectors had not been harmed while living in the UK.

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‘It’s obvious,’ he said. ‘Cheap games like this are certainly being played out in the run up to the election.

The retired 83-year-old tried to recruit a number of then rising Tories such as Nicholas Scott in London during the Soviet era.

‘They started this bogus story because getting us dirty is great,’ he said.

‘It is another comedy, and quite a ridiculous one, because Skripol had been already traded and is of no interest today.’

He was backed by Russian senator Konstantin Kosachyov, who said Boris Johnson’s remarks are ‘unacceptable in the current situation’.