Theresa May to demand Putin turns over Salisbury poisoning suspects at face-to-face G20 meeting

Theresa May is to tell Vladimir Putin that the two chief suspects in the Salisbury chemical weapon attack should be made to face justice, when she meets the Russian president on Friday.

In the margins of the G20 summit in Japan, the pair will hold their first formal bilateral talks since the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, with nerve agent in March 2018.

Two Russian nationals, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, were charged last September with conspiracy to murder the Skripals and a police officer who came to their aid.

Ms May told the House of Commons then that they had been identified as officers of the Russian GRU military intelligence agency.

They are also believed to have discarded a sample of the deadly nerve agent in a perfume bottle, leading to the death months later of Dawn Sturgess.

It is thought unlikely that Moscow will breach its strict bar on extradition of Russian citizens to face trial in foreign courts, though the suspects could face arrest under an international warrant if they leave their home country.

Nonetheless, Ms May said she would raise the UK’s extradition request with Mr Putin during their talks.

“I’m going to make absolutely clear the position the UK takes in relation to what happened in Salisbury,” said the prime minister. “We believe these individuals should be brought to justice.

She added: “We believe that obviously we have identified the evidence, we have identified two individuals, we believe that they should be brought to justice. It’s a longstanding position that Russia does not allow the extradition of its nationals.

“But there are European arrest warrants out for these individuals and if they step foot outside Russia then we will be making every effort to ensure that they are brought to justice.”

Mr Putin has urged the UK to “forget” the assassination attempt and the Kremlin seemed keen to turn the page on the row, which has plunged relations into a post-Cold War low, saying: “If any kind of opportunity can be found in our relations with Britain to establish new cooperation, then we will only welcome that.”

London has signalled that it is open to less chilly relations, conditional on clear evidence of Russia changing its ways.

But British officials were playing down suggestions that the meeting in Osaka amounted to the start of a thaw. “This meeting does not represent a normalisation of relations,” said one official.

Ms May said she would use Friday’s encounter to send a “very clear message” to Mr Putin about the need for Russia to cease destabilising activities on the international stage.

“We have no argument with the Russian people,” she said. “Our position in relation to what happened on the streets of Salisbury is well known and it has not changed

“We would be open to a different relationship with Russia but if that is going to happen then Russia needs to stop its activity that undermines international treaties and undermines our collective security like what happened on the streets of Salisbury.

“What this meeting enables me to do is to give that very clear message leader-to-leader.”

At the time of the attack, then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson said it was “overwhelmingly likely” that the Salisbury attack was ordered directly by Mr Putin – something the Russian president has denied.

Countries around the world expelled a total of more than 150 Russian diplomats in solidarity with the UK, and numbers of British diplomats were thrown out of Russia in a tit-for-tat response which has degraded contacts between the countries.

Ms May last spoke with the Russian president when he approached her on the margins of a previous G20 leaders’ summit in Argentina last November.

Mr Putin said earlier this month that he hoped Ms May’s successor as PM would forget the Salisbury affair.

“When all’s said and done we need to turn this page connected with spies and assassination attempts,” the Russian president said at an economic forum in St Petersburg.

“He’s your agent not ours. That means you spied against us and it’s hard for me to say what happened with him subsequently. We need to forget about all this in the final analysis.”