Who poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia?
Rex Tillerson thinks he knows. Tillerson, in one of his last statements as secretary of State, said that Novichok, the banned and highly poisonous nerve agent that hospitalized the Skripals on March 4, “clearly came from Russia.”
“[T]his is a substance that is known to us and does not exist widely . . . It is only in the hands of a very, very limited number of parties,” he said on his return flight from Africa to Washington.
British prime minister Theresa May thinks she knows, too. Novichok is believed to be manufactured only in Russia, and Putin’s Russia has a history of illegal actions in Britain. May expelled 23 “undeclared intelligence agents,” as she described them, and denounced the “unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom.”
This is the biggest expulsion from the U.K. since the end of the Cold War. Anglo-Russian relations are at their lowest ebb in decades, and with May co-ordinating a response with the United States, the crisis is still worsening.
“We will not tolerate the threat to life of British people and others on British soil from the Russian government. Nor will we tolerate such a flagrant breach of Russia’s international obligations,” May told the House of Commons Wednesday afternoon. “We will freeze Russian state assets wherever we have evidence they may be used to threaten the life or property of U.K. nationals or residents. There is no place for these people—or their money—in our country.”
May also announced the cancellation of the imminent visit to Britain by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and the withdrawal of official British representatives from the 2018 World Cup, which will be held in Russia in June.
Skripal, a colonel in Russian military intelligence, was convicted in 2006 of spying for Britain. Sentenced to 13 years in a penal colony, he was freed in 2010 in a spy exchange, and settled in Salisbury, a scenic and quiet town in western England. He bought a home for £260,000—cash, of course—and lived on an MI6 pension. He made friends in his new home, and became a regular at the Railway Social Club, where he took his Sunday roast with beer and vodka.
Skripal’s wife died of cancer in 2012. A year earlier, his son, also named Sergei, died suddenly while on holiday in St. Petersburg. In retrospect, at least one of these deaths looks suspicious. Yet Skripal did not move, and in 2014 his daughter, Yulia, moved back to Russia, to work for Pepsi in Moscow.
Recently, however, Skripal’s neighbors noticed that he was keeping the lights off in his house, and changing his normal routine. When Yulia came from Moscow in early March, he avoided the Railway Social Club. Instead they went to a pub and then had lunch at an Italian restaurant. Later in the afternoon, father and daughter were found catatonic on a park bench. Dozens of diners, passers-by and emergency responders were exposed to the toxin. Police in chemical suits are still working at the scene, and news reports have emerged that authorities have advised those who were in the vicinity of the attack to take precautions.
“The temperature of Russia-U.K. relations drops to minus 23,” the Russian embassy in London tweeted, “but we are not afraid of cold weather.” Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador, has said that the expulsion of alleged spies will be reciprocated in traditional fashion. In Moscow, the Russian foreign ministry has summoned the British ambassador, Laurie Bristol, to object to what it calls May’s “openly provocative” response.
“No one here believes this was a Russian attack,” Evgeny Primakov Jr., a “trusted representative” authorized by Putin to speak on his behalf on foreign policy during the Russian election campaign, told the London Telegraph. “We are absolutely sure, 100 percent sure, that the whole thing is aimed at our elections. In my personal opinion, I’m absolutely sure Sergei Skripal was poisoned by the British or American secret services.”
Similar denials were offered Wednesday when Britain presented its case at an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council. The Russian envoy Vassily Nebenzia denied that Russia had ever manufactured Novichok, and accused “the countries who have carried out research on these weapons, including Britain.”
Yet the Skripals’ poisoning, and the implausible Russian claims of innocence, fit a pattern in which Russia violations of international law are followed by angry denials and open threats.
In 2006, the ex-FSB officer and defector Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London with polonium-210. Russian officials denied knowledge of Litvinenko’s assassination, but Scotland Yard believes that Putin probably ordered the killing personally.
In 2014, when Russian soldiers shed their uniforms as they invaded Ukraine and took the Crimea, Putin claimed they were “local volunteers.” His government continues to deny any responsibility for the shooting down in July 2014 of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 with a Russian-made Buk missile fired by pro-Russian separatists.
And this week, British counter-terrorism police are investigating another suspicious Russian death in London. Like Litvinenko, Nikolai Glushkov was an associate of the late Boris Berezovsky, the anti-Putin oligarch who sought asylum in Britain in 2003 and who was found hanged in 2013.
The coroner recorded an open verdict in Berezovsky’s death. Glushkov, had been last seen in a “perfect mood” as he prepared for a court case against the Russian state airline Aeroflot and he was found “suffocated,” according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant. The mortality rate among the Russian exiles who gathered around Berezovsky is strikingly high.
May had given Putin’s government until midnight on Tuesday to explain the poisoning of the Skripals. She used that time to co-ordinate with allies. At the United Nations, U.S. ambassador Nikki Haley called for immediate action: “If we don’t take immediate concrete measures to address this now, Salisbury will not be the last place we see chemical weapons used. They could be used here in New York, or in cities of any country that sits on this council. This is a defining moment.”
It is. Since the 1990s, Britain has granted asylum to Putin’s enemies, while assuming that Russia would abide by international laws on asylum and not go committing murder in other people’s countries. This is no longer the case. In Europe, as in the Middle East, Russia is breaking international norms in its effort to recover its Cold War empire. Last week, Putin announced a new Russia nuclear program, “to make the West hear us.”
Britain has also joined the effort to contain the expansion of Russian influence in eastern Europe, which it considers its historic sphere of influence. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO sent an Enhanced Forward Presence to the Baltic states. Britain currently has troops in Estonia. With diplomatic tension as high as it has been since 1990, they are now dangerously exposed. What exactly will NATO do if Putin launches a Crimea-style provocation?
The Cold War security architecture is crumbling in Europe. While the United States has shrunk its commitment to Europe’s security, the European Union has failed to generate a common security policy at all. Putin is aggressively pushing into the power vacuum in Europe and the Middle East, and Salisbury is a square on the chessboard just as Syria is.
Splitting the United States from its closest European ally is vital to Putin’s goal of pulling Europe out of America’s sphere of influence and into Russia’s. He knows that the British will calibrate their position to that of the United States, and he is heightening the crisis to see how far the United States will go.
