Looking on the map, the cemetery is around a mile away from the bench. The Wikipedia page on nerve agents says that the first symptoms of exposure usually appear in seconds. So the distance between these two locations is a bit curious. Kim Jong-nam appeared to be able to walk around normally for at least some time, though, after he was attacked.
The concentration and application of poison is probably widely variable. I’m not surprised at all to hear that the Russian guys who killed Litvinenko got the polonium on themselves and were “mildly” poisoned…that’s so Russian. Remember also what happened at the Beslan seige: Russia pumped in poison gas with zero concern about casualties, and all the hostages died. Russia is…well, it’s Russia.
It’s Putin being Putin.
Point of order - you are conflating two events.
In the Beslan school siege of 2004, the Russian forces staged an all-out assault (from Wikipedia: “Russian security forces stormed the building with the use of tanks, incendiary rockets and other heavy weapons”) that ended up, indeed, with 330+ people killed and 1200+ injured in the cross-fire.
However, the gas thing was from the theater siege in Moscow, in 2002. At the end the security forces pumped fentanyl-based anesthetic gas into the theater; after everybody was unconscious they went in and shot the terrorists one by one in the head. But more than 130 hostages died of fentanyl overdose because in the beginning the security forces refused to let the doctors know what was in the knock-out has they had used, and the doctors ended up trying to treat the unconscious hostages “blind”.
It seems clear that when they say that Russia doesn’t give a fuck, they are not being facetious or metaphorical…
Links to the relevant wikipedia articles:
The UK PM has told Parliament that it is now clear that the Russian couple were poisoned by a military grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia, part of a group of nerve agents called Novichok. She said that it was a sign that either the Russian government were responsible, or that they had “lost control” of the nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others.
Over the weekend, the Russian embassy in the UK tweeted this: “What a coincidence! Both Litvinenko and Skripal worked for MI6. Berezovsky and Perepilichny were linked to UK special services. Investigation details classified on grounds of national security.”
It is intriguing that they explicitly mentioned Berezovsky and Perepilichny. Berezovsky was a Russian oligarch and vocal Putin critic who had been living in the UK since 2000, having been given political asylum there. He was found dead in his London home in 2013 in a locked bathroom with a ligature around his neck. He was apparently in debt and had become depressed and isolated in his final months, so this might easily have been chalked off as suicide. However, the ligature marks around his neck were circular rather than V-shaped, as is commonly the case with hanging victims. The body also had a fresh wound on the back of the head and a fractured rib. At the inquest, the coroner recorded an open verdict.
Perepilichny was a Russian businessman who became a whistleblower, revealing fraud by senior Russian officials. In 2012, he went for a jog near London and was found dead by the side of the road. Autopsies were inconclusive, but, a couple of years later, Perepilichny’s life insurance company ordered tests that detected a toxin in his stomach from the Chinese flowering plant Gelsemium, which triggers cardiac arrest if ingested. In 2017, it was reported that U.S. intelligence officials passed MI6 intelligence indicating that Perepilichny was likely “assassinated on direct orders from Putin or people close to him”.
The chair of the home affairs select committee has written to the Home Secretary calling for a review of 14 other cases of mysterious deaths of people linked to Russia in the UK.
Paging Harry Palmer.
So what exactly would a powerful, forceful, masterful, dominant, alpha prime minister with a big swinging dick do in this case that May isn’t doing?
We already know how this story goes. The Brits are going to complain about the Russians. The Russians are going to tell them to get stuffed.
What does Theresa May’s political strength have to do with any of it?
I have to say it was a strong speech today but then this is exactly her area of expertise. It will be interesting to see what is said after the Russians (obviously) refuse to co-operate in any way, shape or form.
Oh, by the way, does anyone know of any important elections this week? I’d hate to think that this diplomatic spat might overshadow anything important or be used as political capital.
‘If we can hack the U.S. elections, we can get away with murder!’
She can get the RAF to get aggressive with Russian freedom of navigation flights with their Bear Bombers, start a war with their inteligence agencies, sabotaging different things in Russia with the SAS, supply anti assad guerillas in Syria with weapons for the purpose of targeting strictly Russian personal.
She does have options, its just a matter of how much you want to escalate.
I’m trying very hard to imagine a scenario that involves starting a war with Russia and simultaneously results in a favorable outcome for the UK. Very hard indeed. I’d say that speculation would require a separate thread…or Threads, plural.
I see what you did there
The UK has been finding it hard to gain EU support for further Russian sanctions. Post-Brexit, their power to influence the rest of Europe has waned.
Also, I heard that the Skripal attack represented the first use of military-grade chemical weapons in Europe since 1945.
Things seem to moving on that front. The UK, US, France and Germany just issued a joint statement.
(I’ll add the text when I find it in c&p-able form.
The above statement makes that very point.
Here’s the statement:
A slight increase of pressure rather than anything more dramatic?
The death of another Russian businessman, found dead in London three days ago from “compression to the neck”, is now being treated as a murder investigation. Nikolai Glushkov, a former deputy director of Russian state airline Aeroflot, was jailed in 1999 for money laundering and fraud. He fled to the UK, and became another critic of Putin. He was also a friend of Berezovsky, who died in a similar manner, as I mentioned earlier in the thread.
They’re making a joke. It’s a pun, popularized by the movie Airplane in the scene linked to.
The joke is that when someone says “some phrase, altogether”, the word “altogether” is ambiguous. It could be taken as emphasis or as a stage direction to have everyone repeat the phrase.
So that’s what they’re doing. They’re repeating the part of the phrase before the word “altogether” as though it were intended as a stage direction.
Surely you understand it now?
I see what you did there.
Yes, but what do you make of it?
Convenient Conspiracy Theory: remember those weapons of mass destruction we couldn’t find in Iraq? Obviously our good buddy Vlad wouldn’t do anything bad like poison someone, so we can only conclude that Iraq’s chemical weapons were spirited away by a shadowy leftist organization and are being used to frame poor, innocent Russia.
On second thought, that may not be quite stupid enough. Maybe work in some aliens?
If Britain really wanted to get back at Russia they’d hold another Brexit referendum due to interference in the last one. Complete with ads saying a vote to leave is a vote for Putin.