Putin wants to direct another Salisbury poisoning on his ‘enemy’ the UK, oligarch warns

One of Vladimir Putin’s biggest enemies has warned the UK faces another Salisbury poisonings-style attack if it doesn’t challenge Russia.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky – once Russia’s richest man but now fearing for his life in London – is still in hiding in the UK after spending a decade in Siberian prison for publicly challenging the Russian President.

Dawn Sturgess was killed when she ‘unwittingly’ sprayed herself with a perfume bottle carrying a Russian nerve agent that contained ‘enough poison to kill thousands of people’.

The 2018 Salisbury poisonings made headlines around the world after multiple people in the quiet city were poisoned with Novichok.

Now Khodorkovsky – once slashed in the face by a gulag inmate – said the Trump presidency had provided the Russian leader with a ‘window of opportunity’ to threaten Europe.

‘The goal […] would not just be to get rid of certain people but to create a sense of vulnerability in the west. Like it was in Salisbury,’ Khodorkovsky told The Guardian.

‘It’s not important whether the victim dies or not, what’s important is that the sense of vulnerability has been created.

‘People in the Kremlin aren’t stupid, they’re quite creative.

‘They’ll be thinking of new ways of doing something. What is clear is that there is going to be some kind of pressure and it will take a similar form [to Salisbury].’

He added that Putin had ‘chosen as his main enemy the UK’.

He told the British Government to develop a stronger rhetoric against Russia and the invasion of Ukraine to force Putin to abandon any nefarious plans.

‘If you cast your mind back to the 1950s and 60s when there was also quite a wave of this sort of brutal interactions, it sort of dissipated quite quickly, which was done by just giving the mirror response.

‘People who work for the intelligence services are just like you and I, they don’t want to die. They started fleeing, leaving the intelligence services.

‘This is when it was probably decided that they should discount using the worst, the most brutal methods. I’m not sure whether British society today is ready for this kind of counter-answer, counterstrike.’

Dawn’s ordeal followed the attempted murder of former spy Sergei Skripal, his daughter Yulia and then police officer Nick Bailey, who were poisoned in Salisbury.

They were poisoned when members of a Russian military intelligence squad are believed to have smeared the nerve agent on Mr Skripal’s door handle.

All three survived, as did Ms Sturgess’s boyfriend Charlie Rowley, who had unwittingly given Dawn the bottle containing the killer nerve agent.

The warning comes after the Federal Security Service (FSB) warned that Mikhail Khodorkovsky and 22 members of Russia’s Anti-War Committee are plotting a coup.

All were accused of conspiring to seize power violently and forming a ‘terrorist community.’

The oil tycoon was imprisoned in 2003 on charges of fraud and tax evasion – what his lawyers have described as politically-motivated charges.

He was released a decade later in December 2013 before fleeing Russia and becoming a leading critic of the president.

Khodorkovsky flatly denied the allegations of plotting to topple Putin.