Vladimir Putin could target UK again with novichok-style attack, warns Grant Shapps

Vladimir Putin could target the UK with another novichok-style poisoning attempt, Britain’s defence secretary has warned.

Grant Shapps compared the threat Mr Putin poses to that of Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler.

Mr Shapps, along with a number of Western leaders, blamed the Kremlin for the recent death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony on 16 February.

Mr Shapps told The Sun: “Putin has Navalny’s blood on his hands. Navalny should never have been in prison. His crime was standing up to an autocratic and now dictatorial Putin, who has a long history of bumping off his opponents.

“He does it at home and abroad. And the world must not waver or bend to that kind of squalid leadership. We know what happens when you do – you end up with the mess of the last century.”

Navalny, 47, was given life-saving treatment in Germany in 2020 after he was poisoned with novichok – the same deadly nerve agent that had been used by Putin’s GRU spy agency to target the former Russian agent Sergei Skripal, 72, and his daughter Yulia, 39, in Salisbury in 2018.

Although the Skripals survived, British citizen Dawn Sturgess, 44, died after coming into contact with the military-grade nerve agent from a discarded perfume bottle.

Branding Putin a despotic leader who had lost any semblance of legitimacy, the defence secretary warned of another novichok-style killing on the streets of Britain.