The cynical charade of pleading innocence but confirming with a nod and a wink that ‘we did it’ is characteristic of Putin’s macho posturing. When the two suspects were identified as GRU operatives ‘Alexander Petrov’ and ‘Ruslan Boshirov’, Putin gleefully put them up for an interview with the Russian propaganda channel, RT. The ostensible purpose was for the men to deny they had carried out the deed, but the prepared script they were given to memorise was so ludicrously implausible that it was clear Putin was ridiculing the British authorities and all those involved.
Speaking in a learned-by-rote monotone, Petrov and Boshirov claimed that they had been innocent tourists. ‘Our friends had been suggesting for a long time that we visit this wonderful town [Salisbury]. There is a famous cathedral there. It is famous for its 123-metre-high spire … and for its famous clock, the first clock to be invented in the world.’
When the interviewer seemed mildly surprised that the men had flown all the way from Moscow to visit a clock, Petrov explained, ‘Well, our plan was actually to spend some time in London and then travel to Salisbury. It wasn’t a business trip. We went to the railway station to see the timetable … But when we arrived in Salisbury on 3 March, it was blocked up with snow, so we could only spend half-an-hour there … The town was covered with muddy slush. We went back to the station and took the train back to London.’
Having examined CCTV recordings of Petrov and Boshirov walking in Salisbury, Scotland Yard had concluded that this first visit was a reconnaissance trip to locate and survey the house where their targets – Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia – were living. When they returned the following day and spent much longer in the city, the GRU-men’s presence coincided with the moment the Skripals were poisoned.
‘Maybe we did approach the Skripals’ house that day [4 March],’ Boshirov shrugged, before correcting himself. ‘But we don’t know where it is, so I can’t say for certain … At lunchtime, it started snowing again so we left Salisbury earlier than we had planned.’ Asked if they had been carrying Novichok in a Nina Ricci perfume bottle, the men expressed incredulity. ‘We’re normal blokes,’ laughed Boshirov. ‘It’d be silly for normal blokes to be carrying women’s perfume. The British customs always check all your luggage, so they’d have had questions about normal blokes carrying women’s perfume in their luggage, wouldn’t they…’
Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov snapped on their mission to kill Sergei Skripal
Even the RT interviewer, Margarita Simonyan, herself an active participant in the propaganda charade, couldn’t hide her surprise at the crudity of the men’s denials. At one point in the interview, she is seen looking witheringly at them and saying, ‘You seem to be sweating … Maybe you’d like some air conditioning?’
In another clumsy PR exercise, Charlie Rowley was invited to the Russian embassy in London, where Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko was photographed welcoming the man who had nearly been killed by the emissaries of Yakovenko’s boss and whose partner had died an agonising death at their hands. In a cynical concoction of ‘alternate facts’, Yakovenko told Rowley that it was probably the Americans or the Czechs who had poisoned him and Dawn, and invited him to come to Moscow, where he would ‘get better medical treatment than he was receiving in the UK’ and might even be able to meet Vladimir Putin.
The events of 2018 and the Kremlin’s public response to them bear the unmistakable hallmarks of countless similar operations in the past. I am aware that the Kremlin special services have continued to manufacture chemical weapons, which are banned by international treaties. They did so in Soviet times and they are doing so now. Secret laboratories produce poisons that have resulted in a number of unsolved deaths, in addition to the attack on Alexei Navalny. Since Putin came to power, the capacity of the poison labs has seemingly been developed and updated in line with new developments in the biochemical sciences, keeping pace with the Kremlin’s demands for specific poisons for specific operations. The main requirement, it appears, is that the symptoms they produce must deter the medics and investigators of foreign countries from identifying the hand of the Kremlin.
The use of polonium in the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko, for example, was a deliberate calculation. Polonium is dispersed in water and has no taste, so a person is unlikely even to know he has been attacked; and unlike most other poisons, there is no antidote for it. The FSB was well aware that cases of polonium irradiation are so rare that doctors do not test for it, meaning that the cause of death is unlikely to be discovered.
In Litvinenko’s case, the FSB was unlucky. They had counted on the fact that most victims of polonium poisoning die within a few days; but Litvinenko’s strong physical condition allowed him to survive for three weeks, which gave the medics at London’s University College Hospital time to investigate all the possible causes of his sickness. It was only on the day before his death that they finally checked for polonium; had Litvinenko died a day earlier, the killers would have got away undetected. And if the doctors hadn’t have figured out that it was polonium, the British police would never have traced its distinctive trail of alpha radiation across London and back to Moscow.
Under Vladimir Putin, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of political poisonings. Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist who wrote critically of Putin’s activities in Chechnya, was unsuccessfully poisoned before she was eventually shot in 2006. The anti-Kremlin Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was fed deadly dioxin at a dinner in 2004 with security officials loyal to Moscow, but survived with disfiguring injuries. In 2003, Yuri Shchekochikhin, a vocal opposition member of the Russian Duma, died from the effects of unexplained radiation exposure. In 2004, Roman Tsepov, a former bodyguard to the St Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak and, briefly, to Vladimir Putin, was poisoned with an unidentified substance. An official investigation declared the cause of death unproven, but sources within the investigative team suggested symptoms compatible with radiation poisoning. And in August 2020, the Russian opposition activist, Alexei Navalny, spent two and a half weeks in a coma after being poisoned with a new type of Novichok while returning from Siberia to Moscow. Investigations uncovered the identities of the FSB agents who had smeared the deadly nerve agent on Navalny’s clothes, but the Russian authorities refused to bring criminal proceedings against them, declaring that there was no evidence of a crime having been committed.
A common factor in all of these cases has been the immense suffering the poison inflicts on its victims. Polonium, for instance, rots and destroys the human body from within, eating up the internal organs with no way to alleviate its terrible, inexorable torture. The evidence suggests that the Kremlin’s aim is not just to kill, but to kill with such inhuman cruelty that it will intimidate and terrify its enemies and potential future enemies worldwide – an exemplary killing that will not allow anyone to forget it and will not allow anyone to feel safe, wherever they are.