The Russia Conundrum

CHAPTER 20

YOU ARE NOT SAFE

At the beginning of July 2018, along with many people in the United Kingdom, I opened my newspaper to discover headlines about a middle-aged couple in the southern English city of Salisbury who had fallen mysteriously ill. Four months earlier, Salisbury had been the scene of the attempted assassination by Kremlin agents of a former Russian military intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, and the British media were already making a connection between the two events. As someone with first-hand experience of Vladimir Putin’s methods, I knew this did not make sense. In the minds of Putin’s regime, Skripal was a legitimate target – a person who had expressed his disgust at the men running his homeland by cooperating with the British; but the couple in the latest story had no involvement with Russia or indeed with politics of any sort. Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were in their mid-40s, unemployed and existing on the fringes of British society. Dawn, who was a mother of three children, had a history of drug abuse and she and Charlie were living in hostels for the homeless. The couple were known to scavenge in litter bins and recycling containers. Why on earth would Vladimir Putin select them as targets for his hit squads?

In the weeks that followed, the terrible truth emerged. On the morning of Sunday, 30 June, Dawn Sturgess had unexpectedly collapsed. An ambulance was called and Dawn was taken to hospital. Later that day, Charlie Rowley fell ill and he too was rushed to hospital. Dawn’s condition worsened and she fell into a coma. The doctors decided she could not be saved and, on 8 July, her life support system was switched off. When Wiltshire Police concluded that foul play was involved, the story became national news. Two days later, Charlie regained consciousness. The hospital reported that he was no longer in a critical condition, but his health had been severely impaired; an unknown substance had inflicted serious damage on the functioning of his central nervous system.

Charlie told the police officers who came to see him that he had discovered a bottle of Nina Ricci perfume in a charity shop bin. After they opened it and Dawn sprayed herself with the contents, they had begun to experience symptoms of dizziness and nausea. When blood samples from Dawn and Charlie were sent for analysis to the British government’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, it became clear that they – like Sergei Skripal and his daughter before them – had been poisoned by the Novichok nerve agent. The BBC reported that police were working on the hypothesis that the fake Nina Ricci bottle had been left over from the attack on the Skripals and had been disposed of ‘in a haphazard way’.

It all made sense. The agents sent by Vladimir Putin to murder a former Russian intelligence operative had assumed their job was done and had simply thrown away a vial of deadly poison, with no regard for the harm it could do to the person who might stumble across it. As it happened, that person was Dawn Sturgess, an innocent woman completely unconnected to the Machiavellian world of the Kremlin, a mother, a friend, a partner, a precious human soul. When Charlie gave her the Nina Ricci perfume, it is easy to imagine how happy it would have made her, how delighted Dawn would have been with such a show of affection. But it would be the cause of their terrible fate.

The unmitigated cynicism of Putin’s regime was demonstrated by its response to the global outrage at its actions. By early September, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons – the body that polices compliance with the International Chemical Weapons Convention – had concluded that the Novichok that killed Dawn Sturgess was from the same batch used against the Skripals, and the British police revealed that the two suspects in both cases were serving members of the Russian special services. The Kremlin, as was to be expected, denied any involvement in the attacks – it could hardly do otherwise – but at the same time, it gave Russian state media the go-ahead to glory in its murderous deeds.

The state television station, Channel One, sneered that the accusations against the Russian special services were ‘the usual British Russophobia’, but simultaneously boasted that the Kremlin would always hunt down ‘traitors’ such as Sergei Skripal. ‘Being a traitor to the Motherland … is one of the most hazardous professions,’ gloated the presenter of the evening news, Kirill Kleimenov. ‘Whether you are a professional traitor or you just burn with hatred for your mother country, I would warn you very strongly not to flee to England. There’s obviously something wrong over there – there have been lots of examples … so many strange incidents when people get hanged or poisoned, or they die in helicopter crashes and fall mysteriously out of windows.’

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.

The Litvinenko operation was aimed not just at Litvinenko himself, but also at his boss, the exiled anti-Putin oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. The FSB’s assassin, Andrei Lugovoy, spent the evening before the murder sitting in Berezovsky’s office, spreading polonium on to his furniture, making a show of Berezovsky’s vulnerability, only to spare him and kill his lieutenant. Putin was saying, ‘We could have killed you, but we didn’t; you are at our mercy…’

State-run Russian television offered the usual tongue-in-cheek denial – ‘It wasn’t the Kremlin who did this, because it had nothing to gain from killing Litvinenko’ – before identifying the real target of the exercise. ‘If the Kremlin wanted to exterminate its opponents, think about it…,’ said the smiling presenter. ‘Stalin had Trotsky knocked off, not Trotsky’s chauffeur. Not Trotsky’s dog … Litvinenko isn’t Trotsky. I’m sorry, but Litvinenko is Trotsky’s dog!’ If the FSB had murdered ‘Trotsky’s dog’, they had murdered him at his master’s heel. The message was clear: we know this is a Western country, we know you think you are protected; but we have the power and you are not safe.

In Stalinist times, the communist leadership despatched teams of assassins around the globe to hunt down ‘traitors to the Motherland’. During the brief window of East–West rapprochement under Boris Yeltsin, that sort of thinking was abandoned, but Vladimir Putin has brought it back. A law passed in July 2006 gave the security forces the explicit right to kill enemies of the state at home or abroad. ‘Special operations divisions of the Federal Security Service [FSB],’ states article 9.1 of Federal Law No. 153-FZ, ‘may be deployed, by decision of the President of the Russian Federation, against terrorists … located outside the territory of the Russian Federation in order to eliminate a threat to the security of the Russian Federation.’ Specifically mentioned as legitimate targets are people, such as Boris Berezovsky, who call for political change in Russia, described in legal jargon as ‘individuals … aiming to forcibly change the constitutional system of the Russian Federation’. It’s a formula that allows the FSB wide discretion, and it has been widely deployed. FSB commanders no longer need to request permission to kill; the law is in place and no one is going to punish them.

Speaking about the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, Putin laughed at calls for an investigation. ‘Who needs him [Navalny]?’ he sneered. ‘If somebody had wanted to poison him, they would finish him off.’

When he was asked in March 2021 if he thought Putin was a killer, Joe Biden had no hesitation in answering in the affirmative. Decisions on the legitimate use of force are made by the leaders of many states and this in itself does not make them murderers. Force may be justified if it is used in the public interest, following a proper legal process and when no other means is possible. The key phrases are ‘due process’ and ‘in the public interest’. The arbitrary and unjustified decisions taken by Putin, or by his entourage with Putin’s consent, meet none of these criteria. They are common criminal acts of violence and murder carried out in the venal interests of corrupt individuals.