Inside a van, and rattling towards the airport, Sergei Skripal was in high spirits. It was July 2010. Without explanation Skripal had been taken from a penal colony, where he had spent the previous five and a half years, and transported in handcuffs to Moscow. Now he was about to board a flight to Vienna. His ultimate destination: Britain.

Unlikely though it seemed, Skripal was about to be swapped in classic cold war fashion. On the tarmac at Vienna airport he was to be exchanged for 10 Russian “sleeper agents” caught by the FBI and on their way home to Moscow. Heading in the other direction were three fellow Russians, including Igor Sutyagin. All were accused of working for UK or US intelligence.

Play Video 2:03 Who is the Salisbury spy Sergei Skripal? – video explainer

Sutyagin had been shovelling cinders on to a path in his prison compound in Russia’s Arctic north when he was told he should prepare to go. He found himself in the same van as Skripal, under guard and trundling towards freedom. “I talked to him for several hours,” Sutyagin said. “We were in the same van and then in the same plane.”

Russian penal colonies are notoriously tough. The biggest privation for Skripal, Sutyagin said, was separation from his family – his wife, Liudmilla, daughter Yulia and grown-up son. For much of his time in prison, following a conviction in 2006 for passing secrets to MI6, Skripal was incarcerated in Mordovia, more than 300 miles south-east of Moscow. This was a grim place of watchtowers and barbed wire.

“Sergei was excited about being reunited with his family. It seemed to me they were his major joy. I think family played a very important role in his life,” Sutyagin said. However, the swap agreement raised a dilemma for Sutyagin and Skripal. They were allowed to take one family member with them. Who, they wondered, should they take with them into exile?

Once in the UK their paths diverged. Sutyagin became a fellow at a thinktank, the Royal United Services Institute, gave lectures on Vladimir Putin’s darkening state, and kept a high public profile. Skripal, by contrast, eschewed London. He settled with Liudmilla in the comparative quiet of Wiltshire.

Skripal did not exactly vanish. His semi-detached four-bedroom home, bought in 2011 for £260,000, was registered in his own name. In Russia, Skripal had worked for military intelligence and the GRU, the most powerful and secret of Russia’s three spy agencies. He reached the rank of colonel. Now, at least officially, he was a retired local government planning officer.

In provincial south-west England was he at least safe? The answer is, we don’t yet know. On Sunday afternoon Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found in a comatose state on a bench in the centre of Salisbury. This followed exposure to what police describe as “an unknown substance”. They are both critically ill in hospital. Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism unit is involved.

There are few details about what, if anything, might have caused their terrible symptoms, or what might have befallen Skripal nearly eight years after he exited Moscow. Inevitably, though, the case invites comparison with the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned in Mayfair by two Kremlin assassins. The killers used a weapon of low-key English style: a cup of (deadly) tea.

Litvinenko was a former FSB officer who had escaped to the UK in 2000 with his wife, Marina, and small son, Anatoly. From London he waged a ferocious campaign against Putin, in conjunction with another Kremlin irritant abroad, the oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky was found dead in 2012 at the Berkshire home of his former wife. Police believe it was suicide. Berezovsky’s friends are not so sure.



Skripal’s case is different. The Russian security service FSB viewed Litvinenko unambiguously as a traitor. But Skripal received a pardon in 2010 from Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president at the time; in cold war times this should have made him untouchable. He had betrayed the motherland but admitted his crime (he pleaded guilty and got 13 years). He was swapped as part of a state-to-state deal.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A police cordon in Salisbury, erected after Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found unconscious on a nearby bench on Sunday. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA

The methods of the cold war continue as Russia’s seeks to influence western democracies and push favoured candidates – including the US president, Donald J Trump.

But the ideology which shaped the 20th century has gone, making Putin’s revisionist Russia more unpredictable and more dangerous. In 2016 a public inquiry said that Putin “probably approved” Litvinenko’s assassination. Given the response from the British authorities then – a few Russian diplomats kicked out, the killers’ extradition sought – some observers believe Skripal’s case is Litvinenko II.

“Putin has done it once and effectively got away with it. Why would he not do it again?” one Russia expert, with links to British intelligence, said on Tuesday.

Sutyagin, speaking on a mobile phone by the side of a road, said that any rational assessment would rule out Kremlin involvement. In a matter of days Putin will be “elected” president for a fourth time; there is no question who will win (all genuine political opposition was squashed long ago) but the Kremlin is keen to achieve a high turn-out in the presidential election. “This is the worse possible time,” Sutyagin observed.

And, it has to be noted, several Russian defectors continue to live in the UK. They include Oleg Gordievsky, the designated head of the KGB’s London station, who had been secretly working for British intelligence since 1974. In 1985 MI6 smuggled him out of the Soviet Union. His information proved a goldmine for British spies, and historians.

Another is Viktor Suvorov, a former GRU officer who defected in the 1970s from the Soviet mission in Switzerland. He now writes books. (Suvorov’s novel Aquarium opens with a GRU officer who betrayed secrets being fed alive into the in-house crematorium – a scene based on a chilling real-life black and white video, shown to all GRU recruits.)

Timeline Poisoned umbrellas and polonium: Russian-linked UK deaths Show Hide Georgi Markov In one of the most chilling episodes of the cold war, the Bulgarian dissident was poisoned with a specially adapted umbrella on Waterloo Bridge. As he waited for a bus, Markov felt a sharp prick in his leg. The opposition activist, who was an irritant to the communist government of Bulgaria, died three days later. A deadly pellet containing ricin was found in his skin. His unknown assassin is thought to have been from the secret services in Bulgaria. Alexander Litvinenko The fatal poisoning of the former FSB officer sparked an international incident. Litvinenko fell ill after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium. He met his killers in a bar of the Millennium hotel in Mayfair. The pair were Andrei Lugovoi – a former KGB officer turned businessman, who is now a deputy in Russia’s state Duma – and Dmitry Kovtun, a childhood friend of Lugovoi’s from a Soviet military family. Putin denied all involvement and refused to extradite either of the killers. German Gorbuntsov The exiled Russian banker survived an attempt on his life as he got out of a cab in east London. He was shot four times with a silenced pistol. He had been involved in a bitter dispute with two former business partners. Alexander Perepilichnyy The businessman collapsed while running near his home in Surrey. Traces of a chemical that can be found in the poisonous plant gelsemium were later found in his stomach. Before his death, Perepilichnyy was helping a specialist investment firm uncover a $230m Russian money-laundering operation, a pre-inquest hearing was told. Hermitage Capital Management claimed that Perepilichnyy could have been deliberately killed for helping it uncover the scam involving Russian officials. He may have eaten a popular Russian dish containing the herb sorrel on the day of his death, which could have been poisoned. Boris Berezovsky The exiled billionaire was found hanged in an apparent suicide after he had spent more than decade waging a high-profile media battle against his one-time protege Putin. A coroner recorded an open verdict after hearing conflicting expert evidence about the way he died. A pathologist who conducted a postmortem examination on the businessman’s body said he could not rule out murder. Scot Young An associate of Berezovsky whom he helped to launder money, he was found impaled on railings after he fell from a fourth-floor flat in central London. A coroner ruled that there was insufficient evidence of suicide. But Young, who was sent to prison in January 2013 for repeatedly refusing to reveal his finances during a divorce row, told his partner he was going to jump out of the window moments before he was found.

Skripal poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were were found unconscious on a bench in the Maltings shopping centre in Salisbury after 'suspected exposure to an unknown substance' which was later identified as chemical weapon novichok. In the aftermath Theresa May blamed Vladimir Putin and expelled 23 Russian diplomats who were suspected of spying. Two Russian men using the identities Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov were named as suspects. They appeared on Russian TV to protest their innocence.

The Skripals survived. However a local woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after spraying novichok on her wrists from a fake Nina Ricci perfume bottle converted into a dispenser, which had been recovered from a skip by her partner Charlie Rowley.

Still, Sutyagin recognises that the siloviki faction in Russia’s government, made up of hardline former KGB and GRU officers, takes a dim view of treachery.

“I was once told by a Russian diplomat that Putin had compared me to Judas. That is their attitude,” Sutyagin said.

Alex Goldfarb, Litvinenko’s friend, said: “They had a motive. There is a history for these kinds of actions.”

Tragically, the family life that Skripal yearned for while behind bars was cut short. Liudmilla died in October 2012, apparently from natural causes; she had been suffering from cancer of the womb. Yulia reported her death. In recent years Yulia has been living in the UK, working for Nike and at the Holiday Inn in Southampton.

According to relatives, Skripal’s son died during a trip to St Petersburg with his girlfriend. He was 43. What killed him is not known. There are also suggestions that Skripal’s brother died recently too. Now Skripal and his daughter are fighting for their lives in hospital. It’s possible, of course, that the family has simply had bad luck. But if there is a pattern here it’s an ominous one.

After his flight from Russia Suvorov got to know Litvinenko. The Litvinenkos lived in Muswell Hill, London. On one occasion they were the victims of a mysterious firebombing. On another a Russian diplomat banged on their front door. Given this harassment why didn’t the Litvinenkos consider moving out to the country, to somewhere safer, Suvorov suggested?

Litvinenko ignored the advice. He remained in the capital. In 2003 he started working as an expert on organised crime for MI6. His killers first tried to poison him, during a business meeting in Mayfair in October 2006, hours after they got to Gatwick airport from Moscow. They succeeded three weeks later, in November, escaping out of Heathrow before Scotland Yard had any inkling about what had happened.

Skripal was no Litvinenko. He must have assumed that Moscow had forgotten about him. It is understood he had nothing to do with the dossier on Russia and Trump written by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Before Steele went into private business he led MI6’s response to Litvinenko’s murder. Skripal was not a source and whatever he knew about Russian military intelligence was long out of date.

Nevertheless, if he is a victim of Kremlin malfeasance the message is clear. There is no statute of limitation for treason. Russia’s spy agencies do not forgive and do not forget. The old cold war rules that once governed spying – ours and theirs – no longer apply.