The poisoning of Russian defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with one of the deadly Novichok series of nerve agents has plunged relations between Britain and Russia to their lowest level since Soviet times, sparking tit-for-tat diplomatic moves and a war of words. The crisis has raised talk of a “new Cold War.” It has also drawn attention to more than a decade of Russian assassinations in Britain, only one of which elicited a public response from the British government.
British investigators at first suspected that the poison had been inserted into Yulia Skripal’s luggage before she flew from Moscow to London to visit her father. But on March 18, ABC News cited three intelligence officials’ opinion that a “dust-like powdered form” of Novichok had been circulated through the air vents of Sergei Skripal’s BMW.
The same day, foreign secretary Boris Johnson declared on BBC Television that Britain has proof that Russia has been “creating and stockpiling” Novichok over the “last 10 years” as part of a program “investigating the delivery of nerve agents for the purposes of assassination.”
British prime minister Theresa May expelled 23 diplomats from the Russian Federation’s London embassy, and Vladimir Putin responded in kind. Russian ministers and diplomats have, as in previous instances, issued smirking denials. Vladimir Chizkov, Russia’s ambassador to the European Union, even suggested that the nerve agent came from Britain’s secret defense laboratory at Porton Down, which is near Salisbury.
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“It’s impossible to get hold of Novichok from anyone else,” Sir Malcolm Rifkind says. “Nobody else produces the stuff.” As Britain’s defense secretary from 1992 to 1995, Rifkind was a close observer of the decommissioning of Soviet chemical and nuclear weapons. “Novichok was manufactured in Uzbekistan during the Soviet period as part of their chemical weapons program. That project was closed down in the early nineties after the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union. The question is: What happened to the stocks? They were supposed to have been destroyed, but I think we always assumed that the Russian government would have held on to some of them.”
Rifkind, speaking on the phone from his apartment near the Houses of Parliament, identifies three “possible hypotheses” that would explain the attempted murders of the Skripals. “The first possibility is that Putin directly ordered the assassination attempt. The second is that he didn’t expressly authorize it but made it known that this was what he wanted, so that people who wanted to please him might do it. The third possibility is that elements in the FSB or the GRU might have been working with criminals.”
Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn subscribes to this third possibility. To uproar in the House of Commons, some of it from his own party, Corbyn hypothesized a “loss of control,” linking “elements within the Russian state” to “mafia-like groups and oligarchic interests in London.”
“This is theoretically possible,” Rifkind allows, “but it misses the point. Putin, as an ex-KGB man, keeps a very tight grip on the agencies. He’s not like Gorbachev or Yeltsin. The Russian intelligence agencies, the FSB and the GRU, have links to the Russian criminal underworld. They’re not part of it, but they have links with it, and they sometimes use it for their own objectives. So the hypothesis that Skripal was poisoned by Russian criminal elements, or the Russian mafia in the U.K., begs the question: Where did they get the stuff?”
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“I think we can be pretty certain that this comes from the highest level,” says Tom Tugendhat, the Conservative parliamentarian who leads the Foreign Affairs Committee. “This is a weapon that can do enormous harm, and the Russian state is entirely aware of that. It’s extremely unlikely that they would have let it fall into the wrong hands.”
“The Russian government has form,” Tugendhat says, pointing to recent history. We are talking on the phone, and the British police have just opened an inquiry into the death of Nikolai Glushkov, a Russian businessman who had received political asylum in the U.K. “It’s not only Litvinenko, but also others.”
In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-FSB officer who had received asylum in Britain, was poisoned after highly radioactive polonium-210 was slipped into his tea at a meeting with ex-KGB officer and businessman Andrey Lugovoy. On his deathbed, Litvinenko dictated a letter accusing Putin of having ordered his killing. In May 2007, following a British police investigation into Litvinenko’s death, Britain submitted a request for Lugovoy’s extradition and expelled four diplomats from Russia’s London embassy.
The Russian constitution forbids the extradition of Russian subjects. Putin further protected Lugovoy from extradition by placing him in the Duma, the Russian parliament, as the second-highest candidate on the list of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. In 2008, Lugovoy told El País that anyone “who has caused the Russian state serious damage . . . should
be exterminated.” After Litvinenko’s murder, Theresa May, then Britain’s home secretary, wrote to his widow, Marina. “We will take every step to protect the UK and its people from such a crime ever being repeated,” May said. But the killing of Russian spies and dissidents in Britain accelerated.
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In June 2017, a BuzzFeed report claimed that U.S. agencies suspect 14 mysterious and sudden deaths on British soil to be assassinations by “Russia’s secret services and powerful mafia groups.” The cases include the death in March 2013 of the anti-Putin oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who was found hanged in his mansion outside London, and eight men linked to Berezovsky, Litvinenko among them.
In 2007, Yuri Golubev, cofounder of Yukos oil corporation and an associate of Berezovsky, died of an apparent heart attack after flying to London from Moscow. In 2008, Berezovsky’s friend and partner Badri Patarkatsishvili, a Georgian tycoon and opposition politician, died of an apparent heart attack at 52. In 2012, Alexander Perepilichnyy, an oligarch who had given Swiss prosecutors evidence of the defrauding of the Russian treasury by senior officials, dropped dead while jogging outside London at the age of 44. All these men had made fortunes in Russia in the 1990s and then fallen out with Vladimir Putin after he won the Russian presidency in 2000.
In 2014, the Scottish businessman Scot Young, who had “fronted for Berezovsky in a series of deals,” left a London apartment via a fourth-floor window, impaled himself on a spiked fence, and bled to death. Young had previously told police that he “believed he was going to be assassinated by gangsters and the Russia mafia.” The police declared his death to be a suicide. Nikolai Glushkov, found asphyxiated in his home last week, was close to Berezovsky too.
British police concluded that only Litvinenko’s death was foul play. The incompetence of the police and the sophistication of the methods of assassination are two possible explanations for this. But there are other, less creditable possibilities. An ocean of money has flooded out of Russia since the Cold War, some of it in the hands of Vladimir Putin’s enemies, some of it in the hands of his friends. Much of it has washed through London, where it has been laundered through shell companies and property investments.
A little of it has even pooled in the coffers of the Conservative party. In 2014, Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of ex-Aeroflot director Vladimir Chernukhin, was reported to have paid £160,000 at the Conservatives’ summer ball for the privilege of playing tennis with David Cameron and Boris Johnson. Before Vladimir Chernukhin fell out with Putin in 2000, he was Putin’s deputy finance minister.
Russian money turned London into the capital of the global rich. It also exported the conflict between the ever-expanding regime of Vladimir Putin and anti-Putin oligarchs like Berezovsky. It was bad for the London property market and the stock exchange for Brits to get unduly involved in the Russians’ private business—and dangerous, too. Meanwhile, the Conservative party under David Cameron and Theresa May called for sanctions against Putin while accepting donations from anti-Putin exiles.
Neither Labour nor Conservative governments wanted to stop the flow of funny money into the London markets. The clearer it became that Putin was determined to execute his enemies, regardless of where they lived, the riskier it became to confront him. The expulsion of diplomats after the Litvinenko killing did nothing to deter Putin; it might even have encouraged him. In that 2006 murder, he had commissioned an act of nuclear terrorism on British soil. Britain responded with a symbolic gesture. The killings continued, and Britain said nothing. As the body count rose, so did the cost of confronting Russia.
In 2012, Theresa May, then home secretary, successfully withheld material from the Perepilichnyy inquest on grounds of national security. The inquest failed to develop into a murder investigation. “It’s so obvious that it’s an assassination,” Chris Phillips, the ex-head of Britain’s National Counter-Terrorism Security Office, told BuzzFeed in June 2017. “There’s no way it wasn’t a hit. It’s ridiculous.”
Last week, Amber Rudd, Theresa May’s home secretary, told a BBC reporter that “there will come a time” when the police and MI5 should reopen these cases.
It may be a while coming. Investigating the deaths of Putin’s enemies will inevitably draw attention to the political donations of anti-Putin oligarchs in Britain. Since 2012, Lubov Chernukhin has donated £554,000 to the Conservatives. When Theresa May became prime minister in 2016, she promised to distance her party from Russian money. But since then, the Conservatives have accepted donations totaling £820,000 from the exiled oligarchs and their associates. In February, Lubov Chernukhin paid £30,000 for dinner and a private tour of Churchill’s War Rooms with Gavin Williamson. He is Theresa May’s defense secretary.
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Look at those donations from Putin’s point of view, and the British government does not look as neutral as its property market and its ask-no-questions financial sector might suggest. Look at the blind eye that the British government turned as Putin’s enemies came to sudden ends on its soil, and you can see why Putin might have felt that deploying a chemical weapon in a NATO state might be a novelty, but not one likely to provoke a crisis. But what is Putin’s point of view?
“Putin has never reconciled himself to the loss of an empire,” Malcolm Rifkind says. “He’s on record as saying that the greatest geopolitical disaster in Russian history was the disintegration of the Soviet Union. By that, he meant the Russian empire, built up since Peter the Great.”
The Western consensus on Russia is that Putin’s domestic tyrannies and foreign aggressions are compensations for economic and demographic weakness. “Putin’s not a master strategist,” Rifkind says. “He’s a superb tactician. He’s not a Hitler, he’s not looking to make wars. He’s an opportunist.”
Putin is also a judo black-belt. In 2008, he issued a DVD, Let’s Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin. The judoka wins by throwing his opponent off balance and by turning his opponent’s strength into a weakness. It was not Putin who caused the United States to lose its balance in the world; the rise of China, the decay of American institutions, and a general softening of the imperial waist were enough. But Putin has exploited the United States’ unsteadiness, just as he has exploited the uncertain stance of the European Union. Where the United States stepped back under President Barack Obama, Putin stepped forward, in the Middle East and in Europe.
Putin has turned the strengths of Western democracies—their trust in a rules-based international order and their wariness of conflict—into their weaknesses. When the European Union stepped towards Ukraine, Putin pivoted on a solid footing—Russia’s historic claim to the Crimea—and flipped the European Union back to Brussels. Ukraine was also the weak point of the United States’ regional strategy—it was in Eastern Europe but outside NATO. Putin has calibrated his aggressions to achieve tactical goals without reaching a threshold that would provoke aggressive countermoves.
“He knows, and it happens to be true, that neither America nor Britain nor France nor Germany would ever contemplate going to war with Russia over Georgia, or the Crimea, or the Donbass,” observes Rifkind, who was Britain’s foreign secretary from 1995 to 1997. “We’ve imposed sanctions and other measures to put pressure on him, but he calculates correctly that there would be no willingness to take his actions as a casus belli. They’re not NATO members, we have no treaty obligations, and though we wish these countries well and give them all sorts of diplomatic and economic aid, we’re not going to war with Russia over them.”
Putin has also used the Western democratic advantages of open debate and a free press to harm Western societies. Again, he is manipulating our weakness, rather than imposing Russia’s strength. It was the failings of the European Union that fostered the nationalist movements that now threaten the E.U.’s future. Putin only sends money to the nationalists, to broaden and embitter the internal schisms in the E.U. states and block the development of the E.U. before it turns its economic edge over Russia into a political and military one.
“He’s trying to undermine the ability of the West to act collectively,” Tom Tugendhat says. “He’s spreading ‘fake news’—which is information warfare, and we should call it what it is. He’s seeking to undermine the democratic process. We’ve seen it in France, in Germany, in the United States, and possibly”—before the Brexit referendum of 2016—“in the U.K. as well.”
The tactics are the strategy: to keep the West on the back foot, to prevent it massing its focus, to set its energies against each other. Perhaps Putin did not expect the ferocity of Britain’s response to the Skripal poisoning. Now, however, he will respond tactically, just as he has reintegrated tactical nuclear weapons into the Russian Federation’s military doctrine.
“We all need to update our Russia strategy,” Tugendhat says. “We need to realize that Russia is now a hostile actor in the world and we need to be prepared to address the challenges that raises. We can’t just pretend that Russia is just another peaceful country. It’s not, I’m afraid; it’s just not. Its actions over the last decade have been incredibly hostile, not just to the United States and the United Kingdom, but to our interests and allies. We must be prepared to defend those who ask for our support.”
In 2017, after Putin had annexed the Crimea, NATO sent Enhanced Forward Presence battle groups to Poland and the Baltic states as a tripwire in case of Russian aggression. Britain’s contingent is in Estonia. Tugendhat, a lieutenant-colonel in the British Army, served with American forces in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. He has a warning for Vladimir Putin: Don’t send troops across the border, whether in uniform or, as in the invasion of Ukraine, without.
“They should be under no illusion that if they cross the border in Estonia, British troops will fight, and if they attack one British soldier, they are fighting NATO. There’s no question about it: If they attack one NATO country, they are fighting NATO.”
Dominic Green is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard. His books include The Double Life of Dr. Lopez: Spies, Shakespeare and the Plot to Poison Elizabeth I.
