SOCHI, August 21. /TASS/. Russia’s offer for dialogue with the UK on Salisbury, which it has made multiple times, still stands, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told journalists on Tuesday.
"We have made multiple offers to our British colleagues to sit down at the negotiations table, to lay out all our concerns and figure out where we are in our relations in a normal way. In response we get an arrogant denial," the Russian top diplomat noted. "Our offer still stands."
"However, concerning the investigation of the incident or any other issue that the British side is trying to interpret in an anti-Russian way, there cannot be any more ‘highly likely’," the minister stressed.
"Please, lay the facts on the table!" Lavrov concluded.
According to London, former Russian military intelligence (GRU) Colonel Sergei Skripal, who had been convicted in Russia of spying for Great Britain and later swapped for Russian intelligence officers, and his daughter Yulia suffered the effects of an alleged nerve agent in the British city of Salisbury on March 4. Claiming that the substance used in the attack had been a Novichok-class nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union, London rushed to accuse Russia of being involved in the incident. Moscow rejected all of the United Kingdom’s accusations, saying that a program aimed at developing such a substance had existed neither in the Soviet Union nor in Russia.
Chief Executive of the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down Gary Aitkenhead said later that British experts had been unable to identify the origin of the nerve agent used in the attack on the Skripals.