Does the Salisbury Attack Fit the Russian Pattern?
This article was originally part of a much longer article that examined the attempted assassination of the Skripals in March 2018, and concluded that the Russian state was unlikely to be responsible for the attack. It further analysed US-Russia relations over the last decades, warning western powers to desist from their demonisation and provocation of the Russians.
This long piece became two other, previously published articles. The former was with Evolve Politics (What the Government Isn’t Telling You About Novichoks), and the latter was published here on Medium (Why a US-Russia War in Syria is becoming increasingly likely).
I now publish the leftovers of that work in light of the UK govt’s new accusations against the Russian State. The first half of the article is a timeline of events, and the second is an analysis of previous Russian-linked assassinations. The piece draws the conclusion that the Salisbury attack would be highly uncharacteristic of the Kremlin.
I hope the undeveloped work presented here is of some interest to the casual reader, and some use to the researcher.
What Happened on March 4th?
On the afternoon of Sunday March 4th, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found slumped over each other on a park bench in Salisbury. In the minutes and hours preceding this, they were seen by a local witness to be exhibiting strange behaviour on that park bench — Yulia was collapsed, and Sergei was picking at the air and completely ‘out of it’. The lady concluded that they had done some hard drugs, and didn’t think she was in a place to get involved.
A local doctor, who has remained anonymous, seems to have encountered the couple slightly later when both were unconscious. She and her friends started resuscitation on the couple. The time of this incident is not clear, but we do know that a call to the emergency services was made at 4.15pm on Sunday regarding the couple. It seems both the police and the emergency services soon came, with the police arriving first.
The officer on the scene was Detective Sargeant Nick Bailey, who also became critically unwell after the incident, though not immediately. The doctor and her friends did not become unwell after the scene. The apparent discrepancy has been explained by reference to the fact that the DS Bailey had also inspected the Red BMW of the Skripals, and then visited their house. The nerve agent is assumed to have been in much higher concentrations in at least one of those two locations.
Skripal had received his daughter, who had flown to the UK from Russia, about 24 hours prior. On the day, Reuters has compiled the timeline as the following:
At about 1:40 p.m. (1340 GMT) on March 4, the Skripals arrived at the car park of the Sainsbury’s supermarket store at The Maltings shopping centre.
Some time afterwards, they went to the Bishop’s Mill pub before going to Zizzi, an Italian restaurant, at about 2:20 p.m. (1420 GMT). They remained there until about 3:35 p.m. (1535 GMT). A member of the public alerted the emergency services at about 4:15 p.m. (1615 GMT), when they were found to be extremely ill.
Witnesses say that Sergei was acting aggressively and inappropriately during the meal at Zizzi’s.
The Skripals then went to Intensive Care, and eventually survived.
Who are the Skripals?
Sergei Skripal is a 66 year old retired Russian military general who sold secrets of Russian intelligence to the MI6 in the 1990’s and 2000’s. He was discovered in 2004 and convicted of high treason. He was sentenced to thirteen years in prison. Then in 2010, he was released in a spy swap deal with the US, after the explosive discoveries of Russian sleeper agents living double lives in American suburbia.
After his release, he came to the UK to settle in Salisbury, recommended by friends as being a safe and sleepy part of the UK. His driver reported that Mr. Skripal was still active on ‘business trips’. Valery Morozov, an exile to the UK and enemy of the Kremlin, reported that Skripal was working with Russian groups on cyber-security, and visited the Russian embassy monthly.
In the last few years, the Skripals have started to die with some frequency. In 2012 his wife passed away, and in 2017 his son Lyudmila passed away. According to sources as reputable as the MailOnline and the Sun, at least one neighbour believes they both died in car crashes, but this is contradicted by other sources close to the family who report that his wife died from metastatic endometrial cancer, and his son from liver failure. Indeed, it has been widely reported that Alexander was rushed to hospital while on holiday in St. Petersburg at the age of 43, with many in the family and outside of it viewing the death as suspicious.
From Russia With Blood
In the days that followed the March 4th events, cabinet ministers on both sides of the aisle made pointed reference to a series of deaths in the UK linked to Russian assassins. The Shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry, and other members of the House of Commons made pointed reference to Buzzfeed News’ six-part investigation into the deaths of 14 individuals on UK soil, whom they suspect as being assassinated by the Russian govt., Russian mafias, or a combination of the two. Said Thornberry,
As the Secretary of State says, the incident has disturbing echoes of the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko 12 years ago, and it comes after the exposure last June by BuzzFeed News of the fact that, since 2012, 14 individuals considered hostile to the Putin regime have died in mysterious circumstances on British soil.
Indeed, the backdrop of these deaths for many makes the Kremlin’s guilt a foregone conclusion. The series reads like a spy thriller, with titles such as The Man Who Knew too Much, and From Russia with Blood, describing in detail the mysterious circumstances surrounding many deaths of Russian exiles who were thought to be on the wrong side of the Kremlin. A pattern generally emerged — the targets were usually uber-wealthy Russian financiers who had made hoards of ill-gotten wealth in the immediate dissolution of the Soviet Union, had travelled to the UK to use it without Kremlin supervision or oversight. Failing that, they were close associates of such exiles, or people involved in investigations linked to them. Litvinenko was one of them, whose assassination was supposed to be clean, were it not for the advanced chemical forensics that traced the assassins as having left the country for Moscow.
Buzzfeed revealed in gruesome and intimate details how many of these individuals, often middle-aged men, were found dead after announcing to friends and family that they had targets on the back from the Kremlin +/- the mafia. Often the deaths looked like suicides. Usually, they were convincing enough for the police to call it suicide without further investigation. They would often be on anti-depressants, and will have been threatened or intimidated by Russian assassins who told them it would be easier and quicker if they killed themselves. Other deaths that looked like suicides were thought to have been recognised as murders. In one, for instance, the rare plant toxin Gelsemium was found in the circulation of the deceased. Gelsemium, known as ‘heartbreak glass’, is known to be able to trigger cardiac arrests, and is deemed an advanced assassination weapon. It was only found after a thorough investigation by a botanist working for Kew Gardens. Other deaths included helicopter accidents, and an apparent suicide out of a high-rise building window onto stakes below.
Typically, the evidence put forward by Buzzfeed was a careful description of their circumstances, the self-reports of the victims, coupled with exclusive information from anonymous intelligence officials within MI6 and US intelligence, reporting that all these deaths were felt to be suspicious. The US officials were generally convincing and restrained in their reports — they did not accuse the Kremlin in every case, but admitted difficulty in delineating a Kremlin hit, from a Mafia hit, from a suicide on account of mental torture:
Berezovsky and many of his dead associates were so deeply connected to organised crime in Russia that intelligence sources said it was difficult to tell whether orders to kill them may have come from the government, the mafia, or both. Mark Galeotti, an expert in the international activities of the Russian mafia, said the country’s security services frequently cooperate with organised crime groups. “How it works is an order comes down from the top saying this person needs to die,” he said, and the security services have to work out “What is the most efficient way of doing this?” That might be to send state agents to conduct a sophisticated and undetectable killing, he said, or it may be simpler to enlist some “hoodlums” to carry out a crude hit. At the same time, Galeotti said, “technically challenging organised crime killings” are often carried out by “state agents basically moonlighting”.
It seems difficult to believe that all these deaths, 14 in total, had no connection with the Kremlin. It is likely they were behind, in some way, many of them.
Three things emerge from Buzzfeed’s analysis:
- The targets were generally people who were actively working against the Kremlin’s interests, who had persisted in doing so despite threats to the contrary, and who knew they were targets.
- The assassinations were highly sophisticated and generally untraceable. The killers would use a combination of psychological intimidation and physical threats to scare a target out of their wits. They would then appear to have committed suicide, though a careful analysis would suggest murder. Other events, like the helicopter crashes, were plausible accidents — were it not for the context.
- The UK govt. was well aware of all these facts, but turned a blind eye. They were repeatedly criticised for having done little to stop these murders, and critics generally cited two reasons a) it would repel Russian money from entering the City of London, and b) there was no political appetite for damaging relations with Russia, especially in the aftermath of the Litvinenko assassination that had caused so much political fallout.
The murder of the Skripals is out of line with this pattern.
- There is no evidence that the ex-General was an active threat to the Kremlin. The Kremlin had itself let him go, and is said to have been meeting him on occasion. This fact itself deserves further attention — why were the Russians meeting a double agent who betrayed them?
- The assassination of the Skripals used an incredibly reckless method that used a classic Soviet-era weapon. Given the international context, there was zero chance that Russia would not be accused of the murder. This is in stark contrast to the methods of assassination used above.
- It should be obvious that given Russian resistance against British forces in Syria, it is now advantageous for the UK govt. to demonise the Russian state, and therefore help justify action against them.
Prudence behoves us to bear these facts in mind when analysing the UK Govt.’s new claims about the attempted assassinations of the Skripals.
