LONDON—The British government Thursday stepped up its accusations against Russia’s military intelligence service, saying the unit has directed a series of high profile online hacks including the 2016 leak of Democratic National Committee emails and the release of U.S. and other athletes’ antidoping test results.
The British Foreign Office said Russia’s military intelligence unit, the GRU, was guilty of “indiscriminate and reckless” cyberattacks over the past three years that targeted a range of political and media institutions.
The statement comes following a serious deterioration in British relations with the Kremlin following an alleged chemical-weapons attack this year on Sergei Skripal, a former GRU officer living in Britain, for which the U.K. holds his former employer responsible.
In another announcement on Thursday, a Dutch government official said its intelligence services disrupted a GRU cyberhack of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which monitors the use of chemical weapons, in April this year.
The OPCW, based in The Hague, was the international agency that confirmed chemical weapons were used on British soil as part of the attempted murder of Mr. Skripal and his daughter in March. OPCW officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Moscow was bitter in its condemnation of the U.K.’s claim, describing the allegations as delusional and a “diabolical blend of perfume.”
“They mixed everything up in one bottle, which could be a bottle of Nina Ricci perfume: GRU, cyber spies, Kremlin hackers, and the [World Anti-Doping Agency],” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s told reporters at a press briefing Thursday, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.
British authorities believe the Novichok nerve agent was hidden in Nina Ricci perfume bottle.
After the attempted poisoning earlier this year the U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May has vowed to expose the GRU’s activities.
Many of the cyberattacks cited by the U.K. have already been attributed to Russian hackers. However, it is the first time the U.K. government has linked them directly back to the Kremlin.
“The U.K. government has made the judgment that the Russian government—the Kremlin—was responsible,” for the hacks the Foreign Office said.
Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, which is affiliated to the U.K. top intelligence agency, said with “high confidence” that the GRU were behind theft and leak of embarrassing Democratic National Committee emails ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
It added that the GRU was responsible for a number of other attacks including the “Fancy Bear” or “Strontium” hacks, where phishing emails were used to direct targets to fake websites designed to resemble legitimate ones where they steal login credentials.
The U.K. also said that the GRU was behind hackers who accessed the World Anti-Doping Agency’s medical database and released the private information of top U.S. Olympians and other athletes.
A number of other cyberattacks were also traced to the intelligence agency, including ransomware that encrypted hard drives and paralyzed Russia’s central bank and caused disruption on the Kiev subway.
Diplomatic relations between the U.K. and Russia have hit lows following the attempted murder of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English town of Salisbury earlier this year.
Two men, identified as Russian GRU operatives by the British, have been charged by U.K. prosecutors. Russian President Vladimir Putin previously dismissed the allegations of Russian involvement, saying the two men accused by the U.K. of the poisonings were civilians.
Mr. Putin this week lambasted Mr. Skripal, branding him ’scum’ and a ’traitor.’
“Some media outlets are trying to put forward the idea that Skripal was practically a human- rights defender,” Mr. Putin said Wednesday in an address at Russian Energy Week in Moscow, “He is simply a spy and a traitor to his country. He is just scum, and that is it.”
The fallout from the poisoning led to the expulsion by Western governments of Russian diplomats, including 23 from the U.K., its single biggest expulsion in more than three decades.
Mr. Skripal, a former colonel in Russian military intelligence who was a double agent for the U.K., and his daughter are now under the protection of British authorities at an undisclosed location.
—Ann Simmons in Moscow contributed to this article.
Write to Max Colchester at max.colchester@wsj.com
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