Two years later, Russia can’t get over the GRU’s disastrous assassination mission in Britain

Russia continues to be embarrassed that a GRU team utterly failed in a British assassination adventure two years ago. That explains the Russian foreign ministry’s particularly idiotic tweet on Wednesday.

Russia says the evidence of its culpability is “tired and hollow,” but it is actually unequivocal and absolute.

What happened in March 2018 is clear. A two-person hit team from Russia’s GRU military intelligence service traveled to London, England, with a mission to assassinate former GRU officer Sergei Skripal. They did not travel under diplomatic cover, and, as I understand it, they did not directly engage with the GRU’s senior officer or its station in London. Recruited as an agent by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) during the 1990s, Skripal was arrested by Russian authorities in 2004 and imprisoned. He relocated to Salisbury, England, after being released in a 2010 U.S.-U.K.-Russian prisoner exchange.

That’s the context.

The hit team traveled to Salisbury, concealing an exceptionally high-toxicity nerve agent, Novichok, in a perfume bottle. It used that bottle to spray the door handle of Skripal’s home. After touching the handle, Skripal and his daughter fell seriously ill, with a police officer becoming ill after finding the two slumped on a park bench. The GRU team discarded the fake perfume bottle with reckless disregard for innocent lives and left Britain. Their hope: that Skripal would die an agonizing death and that the GRU’s specific culpability would go undetected even as Russia was the prime suspect.

Vladimir Putin’s strategic intent was to show “traitors” that they would face judgment wherever they lived around the world. The use of Novichok was deliberately intended as a calling card of the GRU — a message of intimidation against the West.

Unfortunately for Russia, things didn’t work out that way.

First, Skripal and his daughter survived. Second, an innocent woman found the discarded fake perfume bottle, sprayed herself with it, and died. The British government quickly identified the hit team and back-traced its movements via CCTV and signal intelligence monitoring, including the team’s use of countersurveillance techniques to ensure it was not being followed. Britain then orchestrated a global expulsion of Russian intelligence officers from their various embassy stations.

Since then, Russia has oscillated between pretending the assassins were actually on vacation, joking about the attack, insulting the innocent woman’s family, pretending the evidence against the GRU is not actually evidence, and then publishing tweets like the one on Wednesday.

But the truth is clear. Two years ago, a Russian GRU hit team tried to kill people in Salisbury. Emmanuel Macron, in particular, should remember it.