The Skripal case and UK-Russia relations
In this blog, Joe Devanny explores the operational and national security policy questions raised by the case of Sergei Skripal, the former Russian military intelligence officer and double agent who is currently critically ill in hospital after collapsing in Salisbury, where he has been living after arriving in the UK as part of a ‘spy swap’ in 2010.
There are two separate but related national security questions raised by the disturbing news that a former Russian military intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter may have been poisoned in Salisbury. The first set of questions is operational in nature and will be the focus of the police investigation into the incident, which now includes the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command.
This investigation will try to establish, first, whether a crime has been committed and, if so, by whom. Obviously, given the striking similarities to the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London, there is already much speculation that Mr Skripal and his daughter were the victims of an attack sponsored by the Russian state. If this were to become a major line of investigation for the police, then they would doubtless require the assistance of the security and intelligence agencies to provide information.
As formidable a challenge as this investigation will be, its subject is a discrete and precise set of issues that should be reducible to a reasonably confident judgement about whether or not there was a crime and, if so, who committed it. As with the Litvinenko case, such an investigation could take some time. If, however, it leads to a judgement that the Skripal case was a state sponsored attack, then a second set of questions will be raised.
One half of these questions would be retrospective, including (1) how could such an attack be perpetrated on UK territory without being detected; and (2) why was Mr Skripal apparently not living under alias, therefore presenting a relatively open target. These would be questions for urgent operational review.
The second set of questions transcends the operational domain and focuses on issues of policy. If the UK has again become the victim of a state-sponsored assassination, then it must urgently review its deterrent posture. (A point underlined by an excellent series of investigative reports by BuzzFeed.) Clearly, if Russian Federation authorities deemed such an attack to be a risk worth taking, so close to the Russian elections, then the measures implemented or communicated by UK authorities were not judged to be a sufficient deterrent to such action.
After the 2014 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, it isn’t clear how much room or appetite there is for further international economic measures against Russia. There must, however, be a suspicion that more concerted effort could be made to investigate Russian investments in the UK, but such an investigation might uncover some politically uncomfortable and unpalatable facts about the domestic influence of Russia in the UK. Might the government decide that the risk of domestic blowback could outweigh the national security gains of turning the spotlight further onto the question of Russian investments in the UK?
Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, informed parliament that the government would respond ‘robustly’ if state involvement were proven. But what does this mean and what might it look like in practice? One response mentioned by Johnson was to depart from ‘normal representation’ at this summer’s Russia-hosted football World Cup — helpfully clarified in retrospect by his aides as entailing the threat of not sending officials to watch matches, rather than denying the England football team the chance to be thrashed by Panama. At any rate, in this instance sport sanctions would seem to be an incredibly weak component of any integrated set of measures to respond to an assassination attempt on British soil.
It was reported on the afternoon of Tuesday 6 March that Cabinet did not discuss the incident when it met that morning, but subsequently reported that the Cabinet’s national security committee, the National Security Council (NSC), had rearranged its agenda later that afternoon to address the incident. It goes without saying that, should the state-sponsored scenario become a major line of police investigation, the NSC will quickly incorporate or re-invigorate Russia policy discussion in its on-going workflow — separate from the more operational, incident-focused discussions that would occupy the emergency committee known as COBRA.
This will again put on the agenda questions about whether the UK has pursued an effective Russia policy over the last eight (or even twenty) years and a reconsideration of the totality of measures the UK is currently taking and might take in future.
One proxy for measuring the seriousness of the UK’s Russia policy over time would be to explore the government’s approach to the recruitment, retention and use of deep subject-matter expertise on Russia within Whitehall, e.g. in Defence Intelligence or the Foreign Office’s research analyst cadre. Over the longer term, the numbers would tell a tale, as would a frank assessment of the role such experts have played in informing policy on this (as any other) issue. This would be a worthwhile subject for further parliamentary scrutiny.
From a national security perspective, it is clear that the Russia question is not going away. The circumstances of Mr Skripal and his daughter’s tragedy are, in this sense, symptomatic of a bilateral relationship that has broken down and a UK policy response that is not fit for purpose. Brexit-related debate may be consuming much of the government’s time and headspace, but events will continue to ensure that any consequent neglect of other issues will incur severe costs.
Joe Devanny is programme director for security at Ridgeway Information and a former research fellow at King’s College London. You can follow him on Twitter.
