President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “must have” authorized the nerve agent poisoning attack that accidentally killed a British woman in 2018, and he bears “moral responsibility” for her death, the chair of a British inquiry said on Thursday.
The nerve agent was intended for a former Russian intelligence officer, Sergei V. Skripal, who became a spy for Britain and had settled in the city of Salisbury.
He and his daughter were poisoned with Novichok by a team of agents from Russia’s military intelligence agency, and survived. But the British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after her partner found a discarded perfume bottle and gave it to her as a gift, unaware that it contained the leftover nerve agent.
Ms. Sturgess applied it to her wrists and immediately became severely unwell. She died four days later.
The brazen use of a military-grade nerve agent on British soil, and the risk that posed to civilians and the emergency services in Salisbury, marked a grim inflection point in British-Russian diplomatic relations. It followed the fatal poisoning of a former K.G.B. officer, Alexander V. Litvinenko, in London in 2006.
Delivering the findings of the public inquiry into Ms. Sturgess’s death at a news conference on Thursday, Anthony Hughes, a former judge in the Supreme Court in Britain, said the operation targeting Mr. Skripal “must have been authorized at the highest level, indeed by President Putin,” and was intended to “stand as a public demonstration of Russian power.”
Mr. Hughes said that Ms. Sturgess, who had three children, was the victim of an “astonishingly reckless” attack that had put “an uncountable number of unconnected and innocent people” in danger.
He found that there was a “direct causal link” between Ms. Sturgess’s death and the actions of the Russian intelligence officers who had carried out the mission, their superiors and Mr. Putin himself, adding, “They, and only they, bear moral responsibility for it.”
