'The Salisbury Poisonings': Who were Sergei and Yulia Skripal and why did the Russians poison them?
'The Salisbury Poisonings', a BBC show that is now coming to AMC+, tells the fact-based story about the 2018 Novichok poisoning crisis in Salisbury, England, and the subsequent Amesbury poisonings. And especially now, as we still live under the control of the coronavirus, the series is going to leave you aghast.
Starring Anne-Marie Duff, Rafe Spall and Annabel Scholey, 'The Salisbury Poisonings' is created by Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn. As the drama focuses on the aftermath of the attacks, it specifically follows Wiltshire's director of public health Tracy Daszkiewicz (played by Anne-Marie Duff) in her prompt reaction to contain the contamination.
A former Russian military officer, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia were found slumped and foaming at the mouth on a city-center bench in broad daylight. At first, people around them in the park could hardly tell what has happened to either of them. After emergency services were called, they were taken to a hospital. It is soon understood that they have been poisoned with the deadly nerve agent Novichok — the deadliest of poisons since the cold war that takes control of the victim's body, shutting down the communication between the brain and the organs. A spoonful of Novichok can kill thousands.
Gradually, it was learned that the former Russian military officer was in fact a double agent for UK's intelligence services. The UK government would later conclude that the poisonings were an assassination attempt by two agents of Russian intelligence service, the GRU, Russia's main intelligence directorate.
Who was Sergei Skripal?
Once the news was out in the open that Sergei was a spy, the case became even more grave. In the 1990s, Sergei was an officer for the GRU and worked as a double agent for UK's Secret Intelligence Service from 1995 — until his arrest in Moscow in December 2004 by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB).
Following his arrest two years later in August 2006, he was convicted of high treason and sentenced to 13 years in a penal in a high-security detention facility. He was also stripped of his military rank and decorations. The Russians weren't content with the 13-year sentence believing that the damage he had done was far more detrimental. The daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said that in Soviet times he would have been shot.
Then, on July 9, 2010, as part of a spy swap for the ten Russian agents arrested in the United States (called the Illegals Program), Skripal, along with three other Russian nationals imprisoned for espionage, was freed. The UK government was insistent that Skripal be a part of the swap.
Soon afterward, he moved to the UK and purchased a house. According to a 2018 New York Times report, Skripal, though retired, was "still in the game". While living in Britain he had traveled to other countries, meeting with intelligence officials of the Czech Republic, Estonia and Colombia, most likely discussing Russian spying techniques. On the show, the Skripals are barely seen at the beginning of the first episode while the Russian suspects do not get any screen time.
He then found refuge in the UK — moving to Salisbury, Wiltshire, where he purchased a house in 2011 and moved in with wife Liudmila. Their family friends had told the BBC that the Skripals had chosen the Wiltshire city because they believed it to be a good area with a low crime rate.
And six years later, there is an attack on his and his 33-year-old daughter's life, who was visiting his from Moscow. In the BBC series, Sergei (Wayne Swann) tells his friend Ross Cassidy (Mark Addy) that "Putin's going to get me".
The four-part drama premieres on AMC+ on Thursday, October 1, 2020.
