Russia’s state-funded RT television station will air an interview on Thursday with two Russians who have the same names as the men accused by Britain of trying to kill a former Russian spy and his daughter.

British prosecutors last week identified two Russians they said were operating under aliases – Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – whom they accused of trying to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal with a military-grade nerve agent in England.

Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Russia’s state-funded RT, wrote on social media that she had met and interviewed two men called Petrov and Boshirov on Wednesday evening.

The interview will air later on Thursday, she wrote.

“To my surprise they spoke in a fair amount of detail about what they do and how they earn a living,” she was quoted by Rossiya-24 television station as saying.

Spent an evening with Petrov and Boshirov. Yes, the “Salisbury GRU agents”.

Interview coming later today.

— Маргарита Симоньян (@M_Simonyan) September 13, 2018

Interview with Skripal suspects is being edited, will be aired "in a couple of hours," RT editor Margarita Simonyan tells Russian state news. pic.twitter.com/hWYzTDSikq

— Lucian Kim (@Lucian_Kim) September 13, 2018

After explaining that her phone was exploding from media inquiries, Simonyan said she would outline how the interview all came together on Twitter.

Simonyan tweeted that the duo called her on her mobile phone, and that “the interview was in Russian”.

“I didn’t look for them. More precisely, our editorial office looked for them in the same way as all other professional editors: networking, sources, etc. I even found a couple, not those,” Simonyan tweeted.

“Why me? They refused to give an interview to anyone else, even to our journalists, T K, they said, they know me on the air and read my social networks and so, again, according to them, trust ‘.

Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov are wanted for conspiracy to murder Sergei Skripal and the attempted murder of Yulia Skripal. Photo: Scotland Yard/Getty Images

Simonyan’s announcement comes a day after President Vladimir Putin said Russia had located Petrov and Boshirov, but that there was nothing special or criminal about them. He expressed hope they would come forward and speak publicly.

After passport checks, Simonyan said the two men were the “real” Petrov and Boshirov as far as she was able to check.

Britain has said the two suspects were Russian military intelligence officers almost certainly acting on orders from high up in the Russian state.

Russia has repeatedly denied any involvement in the case.

Skripal – a former GRU colonel who betrayed dozens of agents to Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service – and his daughter were found slumped unconscious on a bench in the English city of Salisbury in March.

They spent weeks in hospital before being discharged.

The affair returned to the headlines in July when a woman near Salisbury, Dawn Sturgess, died and her partner Charlie Rowley fell ill after Rowley found a counterfeit bottle of Nina Ricci perfume containing the Novichok nerve agent and brought it home.