Vladimir Putin could target UK again with novichok-style assault, warns Grant Shapps

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Vladimir Putin could target the UK with one other novichok-style poisoning try, Britain’s defence secretary has warned.

Grant Shapps in contrast the menace Mr Putin poses to that of Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler.

Mr Shapps, alongside with quite a lot of Western leaders, blamed the Kremlin for the current dying of Russian opposition chief Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony on 16 February.

Mr Shapps instructed The Sun: “Putin has Navalny’s blood on his hands. Navalny should never have been in prison. His crime was standing up to an autocratic and now dictatorial Putin, who has a long history of bumping off his opponents.

“He does it at home and abroad. And the world must not waver or bend to that kind of squalid leadership. We know what happens when you do – you end up with the mess of the last century.”

Navalny, 47, was given life-saving therapy in Germany in 2020 after he was poisoned with novichok – the identical lethal nerve agent that had been utilized by Putin’s GRU spy company to target the previous Russian agent Sergei Skripal, 72, and his daughter Yulia, 39, in Salisbury in 2018.

Although the Skripals survived, Dawn Sturgess, 44, died after coming into contact with the military-grade nerve agent from a discarded fragrance bottle.

Branding Putin a despotic chief who had misplaced any semblance of legitimacy, the defence secretary warned of one other novichok-style killing on the streets of Britain.

He mentioned: “Look what happened in Salisbury. We’ve seen what Putin is capable of.

“His behaviour makes him a pariah. He thinks the more he does it the stronger he gets. But in the eyes of the world it makes him more desperate and weaker.”

Asked if the UK could be hit by one other novichok assault, he replied: “We are always tracking and trying to prevent those things. But do I think he has intent? You have seen that. So, yes.”

He added: “Because it’s so far outside of the parameters of civilisation, it’s sometimes hard for the Brits to believe. But it’s Putin’s modus operandi. His approach if he doesn’t like someone is, don’t vote them out, just bump them off.”

Mr Shapps described the Russian President as “right up there” among the many most severe threats to world peace since Hitler.

Putin has denied any involvement in novichok assaults within the UK.

The defence secretary’s warning comes as Saturday marks the two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

On 24 February 2022, Putin shocked the world by lauching a brutal all-out invasion of Ukraine, sending troops, tanks and warplanes of their plenty throughout Russia’s border below the duvet of darkness.

While the Kremlin is reported to have believed its “special military operation” would carry the capital Kyiv below Russia’s grip in simply 10 days, the extraordinary present of defiance by Ukrainians keen to defy one of many world’s largest armies to battle for his or her nation’s existence has as an alternative seen the conflict now enter its third yr.

Over the course of 24 months, battle traces have shifted dramatically as Volodymyr Zelensky’s troops pushed Russian invaders again tons of of miles to enter right into a grinding conflict of attrition centred in battle-hardened Donbas, the place each armies are paying for small tactical and symbolic good points with hundreds of lives.

Yet whereas the combating hotspots have change into extra centralised, albeit alongside a 600-mile entrance line, the destiny of Ukraine is more and more on the mercy of geopolitical developments.

Seeking to justify his prolonged conflict, and his strikes to rework Russia’s financial system into an enormous conflict machine, Putin is more and more casting the battle as an existential battle towards the West.