Moscow to ask "additional questions" to London on cyber attacks "Yakovenko"

Russia will seek to obtain information from the United Kingdom regarding London’s accusations of cyberattacks, Russia’s ambassador to UK, Alexander Yakovenko, said in an RT TV broadcast on Thursday.

"That’s another opportunity for us to ask additional questions to the British side, and we are going to do this, because this is quite a vague story," he said. "There is the name of the Russian intelligence organization, you know, a few names... But the substance is not basically given."

"So we are going to ask the British side to give more information on that and we are going to repeat our call: if you have some information, please, share this information and we are ready to sit down and talk," the ambassador went on.

Yakovenko also said that Moscow was willing to engage in direct dialogue with London, instead of trading remarks through the media, as was the case with the Salisbury incident.

"We want to talk directly, not through the media," he said.

According to the ambassador, the latest wave of anti-Russian accusations was a part of the "well-coordinated campaign" to discredit Russia.

"In December 2017, when former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was in Moscow, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, offered him to have consultations on cybersecurity," he said, adding that Moscow proposed discussing matters of concern at the expert level.

"The British refused to do this, and instead of that they launched reckless attacks on us without any evidence. So, from my point of view, this kind of allegations is absolutely unacceptable. If you want to discuss something, if you have something in hands, you have to sit down and discuss it. But they refused to discuss," the ambassador continued, adding that this kind of attitude shows that the UK has no evidence to substantiate its allegations.

Earlier, UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt claimed that the Russian General Staff’s Main Directorate (formerly Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) had organized a string of cyberattacks against political institutions, businesses, media outlets and sports organizations across the globe. The Russian Embassy in London described those reports as "crude disinformation."

Western nations regularly accuse Russia of cyberattacks. Moscow strongly denies all those allegations.