Amid Russian Sabotage, U.K. Points Finger at Putin Over Novichok Death

The 2018 death of a British woman from exposure to a rare, military-grade nerve agent was the result of a botched assassination attempt on a former Russian spy, an official report said on Thursday.

With Western officials struggling to respond to an apparent Kremlin campaign of violent sabotage across Europe, a death in Britain more than seven years ago illustrates the potentially extreme consequences of letting Russian spies run amok.

On July 8, 2018, Dawn Sturgess, then 44 and a British mother of three, died from exposure to a rare, military-grade nerve agent called a Novichok. A perfume bottle containing the nerve agent had been discarded by a pair of Russian operatives after using it in an attempted assassination months earlier in the English town of Salisbury.

The bottle was then picked up by Ms. Sturgess’s boyfriend and presented to her as a gift.

On Thursday, a yearslong British inquiry into Ms. Sturgess’s death concluded that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “must have” authorized the use of the nerve agent and thus bears “moral responsibility” for her death.

The British government later announced new sanctions against Russia’s military intelligence service, known as the G.R.U., which the authorities say carried out the operation that inadvertently killed Ms. Sturgess.

In doing so, British officials drew a straight line between the recklessness that led to her death and the current apparent campaign of sabotage, accusing Russian operatives — who have been accused of setting fires and attacking critical infrastructure — of “attempting to sow chaos and disorder across Europe.”

“Today’s findings are a grave reminder of the Kremlin’s disregard for innocent lives,” Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, said in a statement. “Dawn’s needless death was a tragedy and will forever be a reminder of Russia’s reckless aggression.”

The Kremlin has always denied responsibility for the poisoning.

The nerve agent that killed Ms. Sturgess was meant for a former Russian intelligence officer named Sergei V. Skripal. Mr. Skripal had settled in Salisbury, England, after a 2010 prisoner swap freed him from a Russian prison, where he was serving a sentence for spying for the British foreign intelligence service.

In March 2018, two officers from the G.R.U. traveled to Mr. Skripal’s home in Salisbury and applied the nerve agent to his front door handle, according to the British authorities. A short time later, Mr. Skripal was found beside his daughter, Yulia, slumped on a bench, hallucinating and foaming at the month.

The poisoning led to a Cold War-style confrontation between East and West that presaged the major rupture caused four years later by Mr. Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Skripal and his daughter survived. They remain in hiding to this day, their whereabouts publicly unknown.

Ms. Sturgess was less fortunate. As they fled the scene, the two Russian officers, identified by the authorities as Col. Anatoly V. Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, discarded a Nina Ricci perfume bottle that had been used to transport the nerve agent. It was found a few months later by Ms. Sturgess’s boyfriend, Charlie Rowley. Both fell ill when Ms. Sturgess sprayed the substance on her wrist. Mr. Rowley survived. But Ms. Sturgess died a week later.

That September, British prosecutors charged the two G.R.U. operatives, who had traveled to Britain under aliases. A third officer, Denis Sergeev, was charged in 2021 for his role in commanding the operation from a London hotel room. The men were subjected to Interpol red notices and European Arrest Warrants, and have been linked by European officials to sabotage and assassination plots in countries including Bulgaria and the Czech Republic.

For Ms. Sturgess’s relatives, the years since her death have left them tormented by unanswered questions. A year after her death, her son, Ewan Hope, appealed directly to Mr. Putin to allow British investigators to interview the officers involved in the poisoning.

“He needs to show he’s capable of showing some humanity to our family,” he said. “I would ask him to imagine how he would feel if he was in my shoes.”

Mr. Rowley later visited the Russian Embassy in London, confronting the ambassador with questions about her death.

Whether the conclusion of the inquiry on Thursday brings any closure to Ms. Sturgess’s loved ones is unclear. Other than pointing a finger directly at Mr. Putin, the final report provides little new information after years of exhaustive investigations by other British agencies and news organizations.

In a statement released by their lawyers, Ms. Sturgess’s family criticized the British authorities for failing to advise Salisbury residents not to pick up items in public, and expressed anger that the police had wrongly initially characterized her as a “drug user.”

In closing remarks, the inquiry’s chair, Anthony Hughes, a former judge in the Supreme Court in Britain, said that there had been “failings” by British security services in monitoring Mr. Skripal, including insufficient risk assessments, but that the failure to foresee an assassination attempt had not been “unreasonable in the circumstances of the time.”

He said the inquiry had examined claims “advanced on behalf of Russia” that the Novichok was deployed by British agents in a “deliberate attempt falsely to pin responsibility on Russia,” but found the contention to be impossible.

Mr. Hughes said that Ms. Sturgess had been the victim of an “astonishingly reckless” attack that had put “an uncountable number of unconnected and innocent people” in danger. He found that there had been a “direct causal link” between Ms. Sturgess’s death and the actions of the Russian intelligence officers who carried out the mission, their superiors and Mr. Putin himself.

He added, “They, and only they, bear moral responsibility for it.”

The Russian Embassy in London did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The perpetrators remain unpunished and at large. Indeed, Western intelligence officials have assessed that some of the officers directly involved in the poisoning, along with their supervisors, have been promoted, some put in charge of the campaign of sabotage the West is now struggling to confront.

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