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Russia ready to hold briefing at UN on situation around Skripal case

Russia has asked more than forty questions in connection with the case and but so far there are no answers to practically any of them, Russia's ambassador to the UN said

UNITED NATIONS, September 6. /TASS/. Russia is prepared to hold a briefing at the UN on the situation around investigation of the alleged poisoning of the former Russian intelligence officer and British spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, the Ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya said on Thursday.

He said it at a meeting of the UN Security Council devoted to the new installment of Britain’s findings on the incident.

Nabenzya recalled in this connection the British Ambassador to the UN, Karen Pierce, who claimed earlier at the same session that Russia was 'working in a parallel universe where normal rules of international law are inverted'.

"My British counterpart said we were living in parallel worlds," he said. "Well, maybe someone would really like us to live on another planet and but there no other planets colonized by humans so far and that’s why all of us will have to live on this planet, the one we have right now."

"And while we are on this planet, we’ll have to cooperate whether someone likes it or not," Nebenzya said.

"We’ve asked more than forty questions in connection with the case and but so far there are no answers to practically any of them," he went on.

"Likewise, there are no ‘multiple’ Russian versions of the incident, contrary to what we are being told here today, as the versions put forward by journalists are passed off for the position of the Russian authorities."

"We’ll also be glad to give a briefing for the delegations interested in the situation on how we see it, on what happened on what’s happening now around the so-called investigation in the UK," Nebenzya said.

Prime Minister Theresa May told parliament on Wednesday about the secret services’ conclusions regarding investigation of the March 4, 2018, alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury. The conclusion is they had became targets of a special operation by agents of the Russian military intelligence service GRU.

May claimed the operation "was almost certainly also approved outside […] at a senior level of the Russian state".

Scotland Yard released a package of photos supposedly showing the two Russians who had poisoned the Skripals. The official story made public by the British authorities suggests the two men entered the country 48 hours before the poisoning. They held official Russian passports issued in the names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov.

The UK government claims Sergei and Yulia Skripal survived exposure to a nerve agent from the class of agents tentatively codenamed Novichok [a novice or a new arrival, depending on the context]. The incident occurred in Salisbury on March 4, 2018.

The British authorities immediate came up with the allegations that Russia ‘highly likely’ stood behind the poisoning.

Moscow strongly denies any assertions regarding the development and production of Novichok class agents in the former USSR or in the Russian Federation.

Experts from the UK defense science and technology laboratory at Porton Down have been unable to identify the origins of the substance Sergei and Yulia Skripal were exposed to.