A web site of the British investigative group Bellingcat is seen on a computer screen in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Sept. 27, 2018. An investigative group in Britain named Bellingcat said one of the two... (Associated Press) 
 
 MOSCOW (AP) — President Vladimir Putin has called Sergei Skripal, the ex-spy who was poisoned with a military grade nerve agent in Britain, a traitor and a "scumbag." 
 
 It was the first time Putin directly condemned Skripal, who spent weeks hospitalized with his daughter after both were poisoned in the city of Salisbury in March. Britain put the blame squarely on Russia, but Moscow has denied any role in it. 
 
 Asked about sanctions on Russia triggered by the attack, Putin called the ex-spy "just a scumbag" who betrayed his country. He reiterated Russia's claim that it has nothing to do with the poisoning. 
 
 He said Wednesday the former agent was of no interest to the Kremlin since he was tried in Russia and exchanged in a spy swap in 2010. ||||| Former spy only gradually came to realise he had been Kremlin target, says author 
 
 Sergei Skripal initially did not believe Russia tried to kill him – book 
 
 The poisoned former spy Sergei Skripal was initially reluctant to believe the Russian government had tried to kill him, according to a new book, and despite selling secrets to MI6 was an “unashamed Russian nationalist”. 
 
 Skripal struggled to come to terms with his situation following the novichok attack on him and his daughter, Yulia, the author and BBC journalist Mark Urban writes. 
 
 The pair were targeted in March and nearly died. When Skripal woke five weeks later from a coma, he faced some “difficult psychological adjustments” – not least the fact that he was at first reluctant to recognise he had been the target of a Kremlin “murder plot”. 
 
 As an information war raged between London and Moscow, Skripal recuperated, and sometimes sat in a garden near the main part of Salisbury hospital. Against all predictions, doctors managed to save his and his daughter’s life using “novel therapies”. 
 
 Urban’s book, The Skripal Files, is published this week. In it, Urban recalls a series of meetings with Skripal in summer 2017 when the Russian spy was living quietly and apparently safely in an MI6-bought house in Salisbury. 
 
 According to Urban, Skripal said he was reluctant to to be quoted directly, explaining: “You see, we are afraid of Putin.” He did not believe he was personally in danger, but wanted to avoid making public statements so Yulia Skripal and his son, Sasha, could visit him freely from Moscow. 
 
 Urban discovered that Skripal spent much of his day watching Russia’s Channel One, a pro-Kremlin state broadcaster. He adopted “the Kremlin line in many matters”, the journalist writes, “even while sitting in his MI6-purchased house”, especially over Moscow’s fraught relations with Ukraine. 
 
 Skripal, a former paratrooper, supported Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and referred disparagingly to Ukrainians as “simply sheep who needed a good shepherd”. Skripal also refused to believe Russian troops had entered eastern Ukraine covertly, saying that if they had, they would have quickly reached the capital, Kiev. 
 
 The book does not answer the key question as to why Skripal’s former organisation – the GRU – tried to kill him shortly before Russia’s presidential vote. His two would-be assassins – Col Anatoliy Chepiga and “Alexander Petrov”, a pseudonym – are career intelligence officers, the government believes. 
 
 Urban corroborates reports that Skripal briefed western intelligence agencies after his move to the UK in 2010, following a spy swap. He travelled to the US in 2011, the Czech Republic in 2012, and Estonia. Last summer, he spent a week in Switzerland briefing its intelligence service, Urban writes. 
 
 Still, these visits fail to explain why Moscow would try to kill him with novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent. 
 
 There are fresh details of Skripal’s career as an undercover British asset. In summer 1996, an unnamed MI6 intelligence officer recruited him. At the time, Skripal was stationed at Russia’s foreign mission in Madrid. He had previously served in Malta and was a member of the GRU’s Spanish “residency”. 
 
 In exchange for $3,000 (£2,300), Skripal handed over details of the GRU’s organisation and command structure. This arrangement continued after he was recalled to Moscow. There were no face-to-face meetings with British spies, but Skripal wrote sensitive information in a book in invisible ink. 
 
 His wife, Lyudmila, travelled to Spain and delivered the book to Skripal’s MI6 case officer. The officer gave Skripal a gift – a model English cottage – which later sat on the shelf of his Salisbury home. Skripal was betrayed by a mole inside Spanish intelligence, Urban writes, and arrested in 2004. 
 
 Skripal’s current whereabouts are unknown. Yulia Skripal has indicated that she intends to return to Russia at some stage, but so far appears not to have done so. 
 
 • Mark Urban’s The Skripal Files is published by Pan Macmillan ||||| MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday called Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent poisoned in Britain, a scumbag who had betrayed Russia. 
 
 Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found slumped on a public bench in the English city of Salisbury in March. Britain says they were poisoned with a nerve agent administered by Russian intelligence officers. 
 
 Russia denies involvement in the affair, which has deepened its international isolation. 
 
 “I see that some of your colleagues are pushing the theory that Mr Skripal was almost some kind of human rights activist,” Putin said at an energy forum in Moscow when asked about the case. 
 
 “He was simply a spy. A traitor to the motherland. He’s simply a scumbag, that’s all,” Putin added, in remarks that drew applause from parts of the audience. 
 
 The Russian leader, a former intelligence officer himself, said the Skripal scandal had been artificially exaggerated, but said he thought it would fade from the headlines at some point and that the sooner it quietened down the better. 
 
 Putin said Moscow was still ready to cooperate with Britain when it came to investigating what happened, an offer London has so far declined to take up. 
 
 British officials say the poisoning was carried out by Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency almost certainly acting with the approval of Russian officials. Russia has denied that. 
 
 ‘ONE OF OLDEST PROFESSIONS’ 
 
 Putin also dismissed the allegation that Russia was responsible for the accidental poisoning of Dawn Sturgess, a Salisbury-area woman who British police said died after coming into contact with the nerve agent Novichok which her partner had found in a discarded perfume bottle. 
 
 “What, did some guys rock up and start poisoning homeless people over there?” said Putin, repeating a description of Sturgess and her partner used by some Russian state media. “What rubbish.” 
 
 Skripal had served time in a Russian prison for selling information to Britain, and Moscow had agreed to release him as part of a spay swap, said Putin, suggesting Russia therefore had no motive to kill him. 
 
 “We didn’t need to poison anyone over there. This traitor Skripal was caught, he was punished and did five years in prison. We let him go, he left the country and he continued to cooperate there and consult some intelligence services. So what?” 
 
 The two Russian men Britain accuses of jetting to England to try to murder Skripal said in a TV interview last month that they were innocent tourists who had visited the city of Salisbury to see its cathedral. 
 
 London says their explanation is so far-fetched as to all but prove Russia’s involvement, while investigative website Bellingcat has published a picture of a decorated Russian military intelligence colonel it named as Anatoliy Chepiga who resembles one of the two men Britain caught on CCTV. 
 
 FILE PHOTO: Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during a session of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia September 12, 2018. Mikhail Metzel/TASS Host Photo Agency/Pool via REUTERS 
 
 Putin said spy scandals were nothing new. 
 
 “Did problems between intelligence services start yesterday?” quipped Putin. 
 
 “As is well known, espionage, like prostitution, is one of the world’s oldest professions.”
– Vladimir Putin has previously addressed the poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal, but never quite like this. When asked on Wednesday about sanctions imposed on Russia in the wake of the attack, Putin dismissed the ex-spy as "just a scumbag" who turned on his country, reports the AP. "I see that some of your colleagues are pushing the theory that Mr. Skripal was almost some kind of human rights activist," Putin said while at a Moscow energy forum, per Reuters. "He was simply a spy. A traitor to the motherland. There is such a concept—a traitor to the motherland. He was one of those." The comments come a day after a report from the Guardian suggesting Skripal didn't initially believe his former country could have turned on him. That tidbit comes via a book by BBC journalist Mark Urban out this week. In The Skripal Files, Urban writes that after waking from a five-week coma, Skripal was at first reluctant to believe the Russian government tried to kill him. The Guardian has much more on Urban's book, which incorporates a series of meetings he had with Skripal in the summer of 2017, well before Skripal was poisoned with novichok. Urban found Skripal parroted "the Kremlin line in many matters," including those related to Crimea and the Ukraine, but reportedly expressed a reluctance to be quoted, saying, "we are afraid of Putin." (An investigative group says it has unmasked the identity of one of the suspects in Skripal's poisoning.)