TASS, January 11. Former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal did not get in touch with his relatives after the news of his mother’s death came on January 7, his niece Viktoria Skripal told TASS on Monday.

"On January 7, we called the British Embassy in Moscow and passed the information along. The embassy assured that this information would be conveyed through the embassy’s channels later in the day. On January 7, an hour and a half later, we passed this information along to the Daily Mail, and they published a news item on their website and then in a print edition. <…> I believe this information has been conveyed to them, but they offered no condolences. That is, we received no information from them. <…> I do not know in what condition Sergei Viktorovich himself is," Viktoria noted.

Skripal’s daughter Yulia did not get in touch with anyone after her grandmother’s death either, she added.

Sergei Skripal’s mother died in the city of Yaroslavl at the age of 92 on January 7. She had been in hospital since December 30 after contracting COVID-19.

Former Russian military intelligence 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, according to the British side, suffered the effects of a nerve agent in the British city of Salisbury on March 4, 2018.

London rushed to accuse Russia of being involved in the incident, claiming that the substance used in the attack had been a Novichok-class nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union. Moscow rejected all allegations, saying that neither the Soviet Union nor Russia had ever had any program aimed at developing such an agent. Britain’s military chemical laboratory at Porton Down failed to establish the origin of the substance that poisoned the Skripals.