(Bloomberg) -- President Vladimir Putin lashed out at ex-spy Sergei Skripal as a “scuмbag” and a “traitor” in his harshest public response yet to accusations that Russia targeted the double agent in the first chemical-weapons attack in Europe since World War II.

Skripal, who survived a nerve-agent poisoning in March in the English city of Salisbury together with his daughter Yulia, is “just a spy, a traitor to his motherland,” Putin told an energy forum in Moscow on Wednesday. “He’s just a scuмbag.”