Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said that the UK may boycott the 2018 FIFA World Cup, which will be held in Russia in the summer, if the involvement of Russian intelligence services in the poisoning of former GRU colonel Sergei Skripal is proven, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
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This was reported by the British publication The Guardian.
“I think it's hard to see how Britain could end up at the World Cup,” he said, calling Russia “vicious and destructive.”
Johnson drew a parallel between the incident and what happened to Alexander Litvinenko, who the British believe was allegedly poisoned in London in 2006 by Russian agents.
Later in Britain they explained that a possible boycott of the 2018 World Cup concerns only officials and not members of the football team.
At the same time, the Russian embassy in the UK denies that the poisoning of Skripal occurred as a result of “planned actions of the Russian special services.”
According to the publication, the Russian Foreign Ministry denied Boris Johnson’s remarks about the incident, and press secretary Maria Zakharova called the minister’s comments “wild.”
Let us remind you that ex-GRU reserve colonel Sergei Skripal, who was convicted of spying for the British intelligence services and now lives in the kingdom, was poisoned by an unknown substance in a shopping center in Salisbury.