In a post on her Telegram channel on Monday, Margarita Simonyan appeared to acknowledge Russia’s role in the Skripal poisoning, when she wrote that Russian “professionals who want to admire the spires” should travel to Estonia to hunt down the alleged murderer of Darya Dugina’s daughter. of an ultra-nationalist Russian ideologue who was killed in a car bomb on Saturday night. Russia has accused Ukrainian intelligence services of carrying out Dugina’s murder and said the alleged perpetrator fled across the Russian border into Estonia shortly after the murder was committed. “Dasa’s killers are already in Estonia. Estonia, of course, will not extradite them. I’m sure we have professionals who want to admire the cones in the Tallinn area,” Simonyan wrote, a clear reference to the two Russian GRU agents – Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – accused of poisoning Sergei and Yulia Skripal on British soil on March. 2018. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The two men, who have since been charged by the UK over the poisoning in Wiltshire, told Simonyan in an RT interview in 2018 that they were traveling to “magnificent” Salisbury as tourists to visit the “world-famous 123-metre spire”. Russia has always vehemently denied any involvement in the poisoning, although Vladimir Putin has previously called double agent Skripal a “crook” and “traitor”. Simonyan is said to have a direct line to the Kremlin in her office and received an award from Putin for “objectivity” following the 2014 annexation of Crimea. It wouldn’t be the first time Russia has changed its official line on a major development. Weeks after Russia annexed Crimea, Putin admitted he had “of course” deployed troops to the peninsula, having earlier insisted the troops were “local self-defense forces”.
