New York Times: Yulia Skripal is awake and at the center of a Russia-UK confrontation

Published April 5, 2018 at 8:45 pm

This undated image taken from the Facebook page of Yulia Skripal on March 8, 2018 allegedly shows Yulia Skripal, the daughter of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, in an unknown location.British detectives were scrambling on March 8 to uncover who poisoned a Russian former double-agent and his daughter with a nerve agent, as doctors battled to save their lives and that of a policeman who also fell ill after coming to their aid. Sergei Skripal, 66, who moved to Britain in a 2010 spy swap, is in a critical condition in hospital along with his daughter Yulia after they collapsed on a bench outside a shopping centre on Sunday. The brazen poisoning in the southwestern English city of Salisbury is already being linked with Russia by British politicians and the media, sparking an angry response in Moscow.

Photo by AFP

Russian television broadcast a telephone recording on April 5 said to be of Yulia Skripal, who was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent a month ago and is at the center of an escalating confrontation between Russia and Britain.

In the recording, which the Rossiya 24 news announcer emphasized could not be verified, Ms. Skripal tells her cousin Viktoria that both she and her father, Sergei V. Skripal, are healthy, and that neither of them have suffered long-term health damage from the poisoning.