The Russia Conundrum

‘Maybe we did approach the Skripals’ house that day [4 March],’ Boshirov shrugged, before correcting himself. ‘But we don’t know where it is, so I can’t say for certain … At lunchtime, it started snowing again so we left Salisbury earlier than we had planned.’ Asked if they had been carrying Novichok in a Nina Ricci perfume bottle, the men expressed incredulity. ‘We’re normal blokes,’ laughed Boshirov. ‘It’d be silly for normal blokes to be carrying women’s perfume. The British customs always check all your luggage, so they’d have had questions about normal blokes carrying women’s perfume in their luggage, wouldn’t they…’

Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov snapped on their mission to kill Sergei Skripal

Even the RT interviewer, Margarita Simonyan, herself an active participant in the propaganda charade, couldn’t hide her surprise at the crudity of the men’s denials. At one point in the interview, she is seen looking witheringly at them and saying, ‘You seem to be sweating … Maybe you’d like some air conditioning?’

In another clumsy PR exercise, Charlie Rowley was invited to the Russian embassy in London, where Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko was photographed welcoming the man who had nearly been killed by the emissaries of Yakovenko’s boss and whose partner had died an agonising death at their hands. In a cynical concoction of ‘alternate facts’, Yakovenko told Rowley that it was probably the Americans or the Czechs who had poisoned him and Dawn, and invited him to come to Moscow, where he would ‘get better medical treatment than he was receiving in the UK’ and might even be able to meet Vladimir Putin.

The events of 2018 and the Kremlin’s public response to them bear the unmistakable hallmarks of countless similar operations in the past. I am aware that the Kremlin special services have continued to manufacture chemical weapons, which are banned by international treaties. They did so in Soviet times and they are doing so now. Secret laboratories produce poisons that have resulted in a number of unsolved deaths, in addition to the attack on Alexei Navalny. Since Putin came to power, the capacity of the poison labs has seemingly been developed and updated in line with new developments in the biochemical sciences, keeping pace with the Kremlin’s demands for specific poisons for specific operations. The main requirement, it appears, is that the symptoms they produce must deter the medics and investigators of foreign countries from identifying the hand of the Kremlin.

The use of polonium in the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko, for example, was a deliberate calculation. Polonium is dispersed in water and has no taste, so a person is unlikely even to know he has been attacked; and unlike most other poisons, there is no antidote for it. The FSB was well aware that cases of polonium irradiation are so rare that doctors do not test for it, meaning that the cause of death is unlikely to be discovered.

In Litvinenko’s case, the FSB was unlucky. They had counted on the fact that most victims of polonium poisoning die within a few days; but Litvinenko’s strong physical condition allowed him to survive for three weeks, which gave the medics at London’s University College Hospital time to investigate all the possible causes of his sickness. It was only on the day before his death that they finally checked for polonium; had Litvinenko died a day earlier, the killers would have got away undetected. And if the doctors hadn’t have figured out that it was polonium, the British police would never have traced its distinctive trail of alpha radiation across London and back to Moscow.