Moscow envoy: Poisoning claims are 'anti-Russian hysteria'

Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia speaks during a Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East Tuesday, Aug. 28. Photo / AP

A Russian diplomat has denounced British accusations that Russian military intelligence agents poisoned a former spy in England, calling them base untruths aimed at whipping up hostility toward Moscow.

The statement by Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia to a session of the United Nations Security Council came hours after British Security Minister Ben Wallace said Russian President Vladimir Putin was ultimately responsible for the nerve-agent poisoning in March of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury.

Three months after the Skripals were poisoned, local woman Dawn Sturgess died and her boyfriend Charlie Rowley fell ill after they came across remnants of the nerve agent in a discarded perfume bottle. Britain this week identified two alleged agents of Russia's GRU military intelligence service as suspects, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov - names that are likely to be aliases. So what is the GRU?

The agency
Formally named the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, the agency is almost universally referred to by its former acronym GRU. It is the most shadowy of Russia's secret services. According to the Defence Ministry website, it is tasked not only with "ensuring conditions conducive to the successful implementation of the Russian Federation's defence and security policy" but also with providing officials intelligence "that they need to make decisions in the political, economic, defence, scientific, technical and environmental areas".

Allegations
This week's British claim came just weeks after the US indicted 12 alleged GRU agents for hacking into the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and releasing tens of thousands of private communications, part of an alleged sweeping conspiracy by the Kremlin to meddle in the 2016 US election.

Also this year, the investigative group Bellingcat reported that a GRU officer was in charge of operations in eastern Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists were fighting Ukrainian forces, in July 2014 when a Malaysian passenger airliner was shot down, killing all 298 people aboard. Russia's RBC news service reported this year that the GRU oversees Russian mercenaries in Syria, fighting there as a so-called shadow army.

Other agencies
The GRU is one arm of Russia's extensive security and intelligence apparatus, which also includes the Foreign Intelligence Service, known as the SVR, and the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which conducts domestic intelligence and counterintelligence. The SVR and FSB were spun off from the KGB after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As President, Putin names the top brass in the GRU, created under Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, which focuses its energies on foreign threats.

- AP