U.K. sanctions Russia after inquiry finds Putin responsible for nerve agent attack on British soil

The British government announced new sanctions against Russia on Thursday and summoned the country's top diplomat in London, "to answer for Russia's ongoing campaign of hostile activity against the U.K." after an inquiry found Russian President Vladimir Putin was responsible for a 2018 poison attack that killed an innocent woman in England.

The new sanctions specifically target Russia's GRU military intelligence agency, which Britain has long accused of carrying out the attack targeting a former Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal, with the nerve agent Novichok. Skripal and his daughter were seriously sickened in the poisoning, along with a British police officer, but the only person killed was the innocent bystander, Dawn Sturgess.

An inquest was established to investigate Sturgess' death, who collapsed in Wiltshire, England after applying a substance she believed to be perfume, but which was really a bottle of Novichok left behind by the perpetrators of the attack.

Soon after the inquest began its work, "it became clear that her death could not properly be understood without also investigating the earlier nerve agent event in Salisbury," a nearby town where Skripal was targeted, said the inquest's final report, which was released on Thursday. "There had been no other known instance of Novichok poisoning in the U.K., nor has there been any since."

Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer whom Russian authorities accused of spying for Britain, had defected to the U.K. He was found a few months before Sturgess' death, slumped on a bench in Salisbury next to his unconscious daughter. Both, it was determined, had been poisoned by Novichok.

The bottle that Sturgess found and believed to contain perfume was used in the attack on Skripal, likely applied to his front door handle, the inquiry concluded, and was brought to the U.K. from Russia by Russian GRU agents.

GRU agents then "recklessly discarded this bottle somewhere public or semi-public before leaving Salisbury on Sunday 4 March," the inquiry report said. "They can have had no regard to the hazard thus created, of the death of, or serious injury to, an uncountable number of innocent people."

The bottle was later found by Sturgess' boyfriend and given to her as a gift, the report said. She applied what she believed was her gifted perfume and later died.

"I have concluded that the operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal must have been authorized at the highest level, by President Putin," the inquiry's lead, former U.K. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Hughes, said in the report. "I therefore conclude that all those involved in the assassination attempt … were morally responsible for Dawn Sturgess' death."

In a statement announcing the new sanctions, the U.K. government said the GRU, "attempts to conduct hybrid operations, including using cyber-attacks and spreading disinformation with intent to cause devastating real-world consequences, as well as recruiting criminal proxies to do their dirty work."