The Russia thing: WTF is going on?
A quiet city in Wiltshire is at the centre of a major international incident following a nerve-agent attack on an ex-Russian double agent and his daughter. What’s going on? Why are so many people being mysteriously killed in Britain? Did Russia do it?
At 4.15pm on Sunday 4 March, police officers in the sleepy Cathedral city of Salisbury were alerted to a bench outside a shopping centre where a man and a woman were said to be looking unwell.
The man was 66-year-old Sergei Skripal and the woman, his 33-year-old daughter Yulia.
In the hours and days following the discovery of the former Russian double agent and his daughter, apparently poisoned and left for dead, a full-blown diplomatic incident has unfolded threatening the already frayed relationship between Britain and Russia.
Almost immediately Russia was being blamed for the incident and there were immediate echoes of the murder of another former Russian spy on British soil, Alexander Litvinenko.
The Berlin Wall may have come down and the Soviet Union might be a thing of the past but the hostilities and mistrust between Russia and the West never really went away.
Bubbling under the surface, the spies, double agents, assassins, and murky characters have been going about their business and the high profile murders are just the incidents that have made it into the headlines.
Theresa May has issued an ultimatum to Moscow: explain why a Russian-made nerve agent was used in the attack or expect consequences.
As the midnight deadline for her ultimatum approaches, we take a look at some of the articles which dig a bit deeper into Vladimir Putin and his campaign of disruption across the west.
Unexplained deaths on British soil
Last summer Buzzfeed’s investigative team joined together the dots between 14 deaths in the UK over the past 20 years and linked them back to Russia.
It was widely read at the time of publication but no apparent action was taken by the police or security and intelligence forces.
Now in the light of the Salisbury poisoning, MPs are calling for a review of the cases and the investigation has been namechecked in House of Commons debates.
However the family of one of the people discussed in the article, Times reporter Daniel McGrory, has said that claims that he was murdered have no basis in fact.
They say that they remain “completely satisfied by the coroner’s assessment that he died of natural causes”.
The murder of Alexander Litvinenko
A former Russian spy poisoned in the UK with an unsual highly toxic substance? We’ve heard this story before and it ended with the tragic death of Alexander Litvinenko.
An official inquiry into his murder concluded that President Putin “probably” ordered the hit but the two men named as likely responsible for the murder remain free and are now considered heroes in Russia.
Alexander’s widow Marina Litvinenko is warning the British government that they should act decisively and send a message to Moscow.
Straining the special relationship
How the UK should react to the Sergei Skripal incident is complicated by relations between the Trump administration and Russia, whatever they may be.
Whereas in the past the UK could usually count on the US as a strong ally, President Trump has not offered unequivocal support but rather cautious sentiments without explicitly condemning Russia.
Whether, or how deep, the US president and his associates are in bed with Russia is a Robert Mueller-shaped question mark at the moment but a lot of what is known is down to the work of another former spy: this time a British one.
Sergei Magnitsky
The death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009 whilst in police custody spurred on a global fight against Russian corruption and abuses. Now a growing number of British MPs are calling for a British version of the Magnitsky Act which could ban corrupt Russian officials from entering the UK.
The Magnitsky Act was brought about due to the efforts of American-born British financier Bill Browder who was Sergei Magnisky’s client.
Browder has lived to tell the tale but now considers himself to be Vladimir Putin’s number one enemy.
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