On a bench outside a shopping centre in Salisbury, UK, sit an an older guy and a younger woman. They attract the attention of those around them as there is something not quite right about these two people. The younger woman appears to be passed out and is leaning against the older guy, who is looking up at the sky and making strange hand movements. The police are called. Some time later the whole area is in lockdown, and the only people present are cocooned within hazmat decontamination suits.
It turns out that the man sitting on the bench is a former Russian spy, called Sergei Skripal, who was arrested and imprisoned in Russia, and then released in 2010 as part of a prisoner swap. The younger woman is his daughter Yulia, who was apparently visiting from Moscow. Both are currently in hospital in a serious condition, as is a police officer who was first on the scene.
It’s now been confirmed that they were all poisoned by a nerve agent. Since the man was a former Russian spy, there is obviously a potential connection to Russia. Russia also have previous form in this regard, in that it is generally concluded that they carried out the murder of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in the UK in 2006 through the use of radioactive polonium. The former KGB officer who is the main suspect for that crime is now a deputy of the State Duma in Russia.
So, it’s a modern whodunnit, except that we know who did it (probably).
A deeply disturbing incident but not (alas) unprecedented. I’m no fortune teller but I imagine it will not be the last attack of this type.
The first police officer on the scene was also hospitalized. That must have been a powerful nerve agent. I hope all the victims recover quickly and fully.
In the case of Litvinenko, the suspected co-assassin or accomplice was heard speaking openly about the plan to kill Litvinenko that was intended to “set an example” as a punishment for a “traitor”.
Today, the presenter of the Russian government-controlled Channel One’s flagship Vremya news programme made some comments on a news bulletin that “sounded like a veiled, mocking threat to anyone considering becoming a double agent for Britain”.
Skripal’s spying activities occured in the 1990s, so it might be strange to poison him for that, unless he was still active somehow from his base in England. That his daughter was also poisoned is also odd - was she also deliberately targeted or did she become ill through contact with her father, like the police officer who was first on the scene?
MEBucker has pretty much got it. An important part of the message is that Russia will reach out and touch you no matter where you are. And “public” isn’t enough: if the guy gets shot or stabbed, people wonder if it might have just been a mugging gone wrong, but if the weapon is something the average human being can’t get their hands on - say, nerve agent, or massive amounts of polonium - then they clearly want everyone to know that Russia did it.
That’s a good point. Nerve agents cannot, I’ve heard, be created by someone in their home, and instead would need to be made in a laboratory that was capable of handling such materials. This doesn’t necessarily mean a state actor, though, as demonstrated by the sarin attacks perpetrated by the Aum Shinrikyo cult movement in Japan in 1995.
According to The Telegraph, Putin had vowed revenge on Skripal at the time of the swap in 2010. (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/06/traitors-will-kick-bucket-vladimir-putin-swore-revenge-poisoned/). It seems like it would have been easier to get revenge when Skripal was a sitting duck in a Russian prison rather than wait 10 years and kill him in while he was freely moving about a foreign country. But maybe Putin likes to bide his time and only drop the hammer when doing so will serve another purpose, like, hypothetically, if he wants to terrify a guy who knows a lot about some nefarious deals and is facing a long list of charges in the US.
Oh look, Paul Manafort is being arraigned in Virginia today. Huh.
Skripal was also used as a bargaining chip to get several captured Russian spies sent back to Russia. So instead of just killing him, Putin jailed him, used him, and then killed him (assuming he doesn’t recover). If the timing and overtness of it also intimidates others, then wow, this is an excellent display of utilitarianism.
So this incident is meant to serve as a warning to other would-be Russian traitors? I can only assume that Putin has become aware of a few large rats aboard his listing ship and he’s trying to avoid a wholesale infestation. Interesting that Kim and Vlad share the same penchant for extra-judicial justice.
Here’s a short video of a BBC reporter retracing the couple’s final steps. It appears they ate at a restaurant and possibly visited a pub before ending up on the outdoors bench around 4pm.
In the Litvinenko case, he was administered the lethal dose of polonium through a cup of tea he drank in a restaurant while meeting with two former KGB officers who were visiting from Russia. I don’t know a lot about nerve agents, so I’m not sure whether they can be administered through digestion, or whether it would be through inhalation or physical contact, like the Kim Jong-nam case.
One could speculate that the couple weren’t aware that they had just been poisoned, as they were sitting on a bench. Kim Jong-nam’s assassins made a brazen attack, after which Kim Jong-nam immediately sought medical attention. I’m sure the former Russian spy in this case would have done the same to try and save himself and his daughter. So that might suggest a surreptitous administering of the nerve agent, after which the couple were walking around and perhaps one started to feel a bit odd, and so they decided to sit down for a moment on the bench.
Twenty-one people have now been treated in hospital after the incident. The police officer’s condition is described as serious and the Russian couple’s as critical.
Inhalation is generally the fastest acting but pretty much any contact with the body works. The dose needed to kill is tiny. A single droplet on the skin can be enough to kill if treatment isn’t quick enough.
Theresa May is an extremely weak Prime Minister and thus there is really nothing the UK can do to retaliate. This is just Russia throwing their weight around and probably mocking the Prime Minster to her face since she probably knows Russia meddled in the EU referendum but she can’t do anything about it.
I do not interpret dalej42 as saying that Theresa May is a weak Prime Minister because she is a woman, but because of the difficult and precarious circumstances she (as a Prime Minister) finds herself in: a hung parliament, a very difficult negotiation with the EU regarding Brexit that is taking a lot of the energy and work of the UK government, and generally a weak position of the UK right now in the international arena (some of these are of her own making, but I won’t talk about this so as to not derail the thread… and, anyway, those were miscalculations that a male Prime Minister was perfectly able of making as well).