Ex-GRU Chief: Russian Intelligence Would Never Do 'Heinous Acts' Implied by UK

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russia’s military intelligence would never stoop so low as to get involved in acts attributed to it by UK authorities, former GRU chief Fyodor Ladygin said in an interview out Friday.

"The Russian intelligence agency where I had the honor to work for many years… never resorted to such heinous acts as the ones that Britain is trying to implicate it in," Ladygin told the Defense Ministry-affiliated Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) newspaper.

Senior British officials have earlier accused Russia of an alleged role in this month’s poisoning of a former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May in a speech in parliament on Wednesday said Russia was responsible for the attempted murder using a nerve agent and announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry denied the accusations. Its top diplomat, Sergey Lavrov told Sputnik on Thursday that Moscow was drawing up a list of British diplomats it planned to expel as a reciprocal measure.

Skripal was convicted of espionage in Russia in 2006 for passing sensitive information to UK’s Mi6. He was allowed to move to the United Kingdom in 2010 as part of a spy swap and has lived there for eight years. On March 4, he was found slumped on a bench together with his 33-year-old daughter after apparently being poisoned and remains critically ill.