Russian President Vladimir Putin’s number one target warned last night Britain will “100%” suffer another novichok-style attack.
Russia’s most-wanted Bill Browder said there are “very many” people in the UK poised to work for feared Russian intelligence units like the GRU, willing to form a hit squad.
The GRU is believed to have been responsible for the Salisbury novichok attack in 2018.
His warning backs growing fears among UK anti-Putin figures that Moscow’s hit squads will target them here. Browder, 56, is at the top of Putin’s hitlist since exposing Russian corruption after his lawyer was murdered in a Moscow prison in 2009.
The maverick financier was blacklisted as a threat to national security in Russia in 2005 having been the biggest investor in Russian companies. His Moscow offices were raided by the security services who re-registered his firms.
The crooks then applied for a £200million tax refund for the companies, which was awarded in 2007 as Browder’s lawyer Sergei Magnitsky investigated.
After Sergei’s death Browder campaigned globally to have the Magnitsky Act made law – to target the assets of human rights abusers once they are suspected. In July this year the UK government invoked the act, crippling assets of 25 Russians.
It comes in the wake of the latest suspected Putin poisoning, of leading opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who is in a coma in Berlin.
He was taken ill during a flight to Moscow and left screaming in pain as the pilot made an emergency landing in Siberia. Browder has a stark warning for the UK as Putin is suspected of stepping up efforts to silence critics.
Speaking from a secret UK location Browder told the Mirror: “There is a 100% chance of it happening again in the UK. Putin knows he can get away with it. London is full of people who would do it.”
Browder explained his theory about Russian spies working here, saying: “You have the embassy, the cultural attaches, then you have the people who aren’t officials on the payroll, people employed by the GRU or the FSB organisations and then you have freelancers those people hire. Those people could also be British. They don’t even do it at arm’s-length – they do it openly.”
As an example of how dangerous Russians-for-hire working for the GRU could be, Browder was warned several years ago by US officials a hit squad planned to snatch him in the UK.
He added: “I was alerted by the US government that they had picked up intelligence to suggest a group of Russians was organising to have me kidnapped and taken back to Russia.”
Alexei Navalny was likely “poisoned” by a nerve agent from the same family as novichok. These killer substances cause violent muscle spasms, twitching, breathing difficulty, convulsions and possible death.
Berlin doctors have said early examination of the campaigner showed he was likely poisoned.
Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, members of Putin’s GRU intelligence agency were behind the poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in 2018, using novichok, daubing the lethal nerve agent on the door handle at his Salisbury home.
They are not the only ones targeted on British soil, in 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB and KGB officer and vocal critic of the Russian state was poisoned with polonium by two Russians in a suspected assassination.
It falls into a pattern of Russian-backed intimidation of anyone speaking out against Putin, who has amassed a fortune of around £180billion, allegedly hidden amongst the assets of supporters globally. Whilst ordinary Russians have suffered poverty during his rule Putin is suspected of being one of the richest men in the world, his lifestyle and wealth are of unimaginable opulence.
And yet officially his annual earnings of around £100,000 are comically modest for a Russian president with control over hundreds of oligarchs and Russia’s entire economy.
As well as more than a dozen suspicious deaths of Russian dissidents here, in recent years intellectuals and campaigners in the UK have suffered a catalogue of intimidation tactics.
In one suspected attack, the Mirror can reveal a British intellectual who has been critical of Putin had his house burned down in the UK and suffered a near-fatal mystery illness.
Anyone who speaks publicly about Putin’s corrupt regime can be targeted.
Bruce Jones, one of the UK’s top Russia analysts told the Mirror: “In Britain incidents involving those who assess Russian developments occur below the radar. The Kremlin views anyone who does not conform to its views as an ‘existential threat’, but direct linkages are difficult to prove.
“Some Russia experts have suffered mysterious life-threatening illnesses, others have had houses burn down.”
