Dawn Sturgess, 44, was unwittingly caught up in an assassination attempt against the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.
Published On 4 Dec 2025
A public inquiry has found that Russian President Vladimir Putin bears “moral responsibility” for the death of a British woman in a nerve agent attack in the English city of Salisbury in March 2018, with the UK government responding by sanctioning the Russian intelligence agency (GRU) accused of carrying it out.
Speaking on Thursday after the inquiry’s findings were published, its chair, Anthony Hughes, a former senior judge, said Putin had “authorised the mission” to assassinate the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.
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The conduct of the Russian leader and the alleged GRU agents who planted the poison was “astonishingly reckless,” Hughes added.
The Kremlin continues to deny its involvement in the incident.
Skripal, a former GRU officer imprisoned in Russia for spying for the United Kingdom, came to the UK after being released in a 2010 spy swap.
Eight years later, he and his daughter Yulia were discovered unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury, poisoned by the Russian nerve agent Novichok that had been daubed on the door handle of their homes. They survived after intensive hospital treatment and now live under protection.
However, Dawn Sturgess, 44, a mother-of-three, died four months later, shortly after spraying herself with what she thought was perfume from a discarded bottle, but which turned out to contain the deadly chemical.
Sturgess was “the entirely innocent victim of the cruel and cynical acts of others”, said Hughes, the inquiry chair.
Lawyer Andrew O’Connor told the public inquiry into her death, which started last year, that she was unwittingly caught up in an “illegal and outrageous international assassination attempt”.
The perfume bottle contained enough Novichok to poison “thousands” of people, O’Connor noted.
Sturgess’ family said her death came as “direct result of Russia’s cruel and cynical attempt to assassinate Sergei Skripal”, but that the British authorities had failed to assess the threat against the former Russian spy, something which “put the British public at risk, and led to Dawn’s death”.
“Adequate risk assessment of Skripal was not done, but no protective steps were put in place,” they said in a statement. ”That is a serious concern, for us now, and for the future.”
The inquiry into her death concluded that there had been “failings” around Skripal’s security, but determined it was not “unreasonable” for British intelligence to not consider his assassination risk high.
Responding to Hughes’ report, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the findings “a grave reminder of the Kremlin’s disregard for innocent lives”.
On Thursday, the UK foreign minister said it was sanctioning the GRU “in its entirety”, along with 11 “actors behind Russian state-sponsored hostile activity”.
London also said that it had summoned the Russian ambassador to answer for Moscow’s “ongoing campaign of hostile activity”.
Another UK inquiry concluded in 2016 that Putin “probably approved” the 2006 killing in London of the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. The prominent Kremlin critic died after being poisoned with radioactive polonium.
