Vengeance of Putin knows no bounds
THERE are three things we should all be very clear about regarding the events in Salisbury last Sunday. The first is that the attempt to kill Sergei Skripal and his daughter was a carefully planned contracted hit.
The second is that the level of technology and planning involved mean it could have derived only from the resources of a nation state. And the only possibly nation state is Russia.
The third thing is that inside Russia no one would dare for one moment undertake such a contract killing without the personal sanction of the man at the very top: Vladimir Putin.
The man they call Vozhd (the supreme boss) has at his beck and call five distinct killer groups on whose services he can call whenever he wants.
Two of these are on the government payroll: one is the “wet affairs” department of the secret police formerly called Department V when it was inside the old KGB; the second is the Spetsnaz. These are special forces trained to the peak and in many cases fluent in English and with forged papers, in civilian clothes, able to travel unseen and kill on demand.
Outside the formal government are three other groups. There is the professional, criminal underworld known as “criminals in law”, recently nicknamed the “McMafia”. Their tentacles of criminality are worldwide but inside Russia their continued existence depends to a large degree on the patronage and protection of the supreme boss: Putin.
Then there is a group of extremely vicious bikers – the Night Wolves – who make the Hell’s Angels of the USA look like off-duty curates.
Lastly there are the Chechens, now under the command of President Kadyrov, who will carry out orders from Moscow without demur.
President Putin, who was once a communist and came to power in the dying days of communism, has swerved under the guise of patriotism to the extreme Right.
He seethes with resentment as he recalls the humiliations suffered by Russia, his beloved Mother Russia, when the USSR finally ended nearly 30 years ago. He watched helplessly then as her assets were stripped and sold for peppercorns.
That was when he began his lonely climb to supreme and unchallenged power. All his then enemies have been expelled or liquidated.
He cut deals with some of the billionaires and ordered the assassination of others who held out against him. He has concluded deals with the underworld and some of the surrounding gangster states, such as Chechnya.
An integral part of his long campaign of revenge against those who treated with contempt his beloved Russia is to settle accounts with those who spied against her, breaching as he does so the unspoken agreement between the powers not to commit acts of criminality on each other’s territory.
For him there are no limits to Russia’s vengeance as Salisbury last Sunday proved.