The Salisbury poisoning: Russia’s revenge?

“Traitors will kick the bucket. Trust me, they will choke on their 30 pieces of silver”

Not a lot happens in Salisbury. Until last week, the local paper was preoccupied with low-level theft and plans for a new trampoline centre, said Joe Shute in The Sunday Telegraph. Now, this tranquil cathedral city finds itself at the centre of an international spy drama worthy of John le Carré, following the attempted assassination of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, by unknown assailants armed with a deadly nerve agent. The pair were found slumped on a bench outside a nondescript shopping centre on 4 March and rushed to intensive care. A police officer who’d come to their aid and visited Skripal’s house in a nearby cul-de-sac was also hospitalised. And this week, hundreds of people who may have come into contact with the pair that day were belatedly advised to wash their belongings, as scores of police and military personnel in hazmat protective suits descended on the venues they had visited – a local cemetery where Skripal’s wife and son are buried, a Zizzi restaurant and The Mill pub.

If he knew his life was at risk, Skripal showed little sign of it, said Jamie Doward in The Observer. He lived under his own name, had recently been seen drinking in the Railway social club, and looked relaxed as he bought scratch cards and sausages from his local corner shop. But intelligence experts believe that when his daughter left Moscow last month to visit her father, it set off a red flag, said The Daily Telegraph. A hit squad is thought to have got on a plane the next day. It’s not clear who ordered the strike, but it’s not hard to think of possible motives for it: Skripal had betrayed his country and, as the agents of Stalin’s counterintelligence unit Smersh used to say, “death to spies”.

A colonel in the GRU – Russian military intelligence – Skripal was spotted by Spanish intelligence in 1995 while stationed in Spain, but handed to MI6. Over the next decade, the Russian (code-named “Forthwith”) made thousands by selling secrets, including the names of dozens of active agents. In 2004, however, a mole in the Spanish secret service alerted Moscow and Skripal was arrested. At the time, officials compared him to the notorious double agent Oleg Penkovsky, who was executed in 1963. Yet Skripal was sentenced to a relatively lenient 13 years for treason (his diabetes may have been a mitigating factor). In 2010, he got lucky again when he was freed as part of a spy swap, agreed by Moscow and Washington, to return to Russia ten “sleepers” captured in the US (among them the glamorous Anna Chapman). After an exchange on the runway at Vienna Airport, he was flown to the UK. The next year, he bought his £260,000 house in Salisbury, which he shared with his wife, Liudmila, until her death, apparently from cancer, in 2012.

Unlike Alexander Litvinenko – the Kremlin critic who died after drinking tea laced with polonium in 2006 – Skripal kept a low profile. It has been suggested that he was still involved in espionage, but the evidence for this is patchy. Alternatively, his poisoning could have been a revenge attack by the Kremlin or one of the agents that he betrayed, said Shaun Walker in The Guardian. But if so, why did they do it now, when it would have been easier to kill him in a Russian jail? More likely, the poisoning was intended as a warning to other Russian agents – and in particular to those who might be tempted to talk about Moscow’s alleged meddling in the US election: the cost of betrayal is not just your life, but also that of your loved ones. Russian leaders have been killing their enemies abroad since long before Trotsky got an ice pick in the head, said Ben Macintyre in The Times. Whether or not he has himself ordered any killings, Vladimir Putin has made it clear what he thinks traitors deserve. “Traitors will kick the bucket,” he said in 2010 – “trust me.” Whatever “30 pieces of silver” they got for their treachery, “they will choke on them”. In Russia’s “power politics, a willingness to kill those who betray is a mark of strength and a way to enforce submission”.

But if Putin wants someone dead, he doesn’t have to issue orders, said The Times. He merely has to complain about a “meddlesome priest”, and sooner or later that person winds up dead. Fifteen of his opponents have died in mysterious circumstances in Britain in the past few years, including the former billionaire Boris Berezovsky, found hanged at his home in 2013, and the whistleblower Alexander Perepilichny, who collapsed and died in 2012. Those behind such killings have little to fear and much to gain. Andrey Lugovoy, Litvinenko’s suspected assassin, is now an MP and a national hero. Moscow may protest its innocence, but it’s telling that last week an anchor on Russian state TV listed the ways in which traitors can die – including suicide and heart attacks – and offered up this advice to anyone contemplating such a career: “Don’t choose Britain as a place to live.”

There are more people called David or Steve heading FTSE 100 firms than there are women or ethnic minorities. There are seven female CEOS and five from an ethnic minority; nine CEOS are called David and four Steve. The Independent/involve

More than 90% of chickens reared for meat, 60% of pigs, and 15-20% of cows are kept indoors. The Times