U.K. poisoning doubts abound

SALISBURY, England — After Sergei Skripal, her Russian neighbor, was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent, Lisa Carey pricked her ears for any information about this bizarre series of events.

Three and a half months later, Carey, 45, a resident of Salisbury, where the attack on the former Russian spy occurred, has come to a firm conclusion: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, whom Britain holds responsible for the poisoning, never would have ordered an assassination on the eve of a national election or the World Cup.

Putin is “not a silly man,” she said. If he wants someone dead, she added, they end up dead. “Whoever did this made it look like Putin did it.”

Though Carey’s opinion is not a common one in Salisbury, she’s not alone, either.

“We are force-fed the answer that it was the Russians, no two ways about it,” read a letter to the editor in a recent edition of the Salisbury Journal. Many more express a shrugging sense of resignation; the facts of the case may never be clear.

During the days after Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found unconscious, the British government seemed to be winning the public relations war, mobilizing its allies in a united front against Russia.

In the weeks that followed, though, Britain’s control over the narrative slipped away.

As the British authorities went silent on the progress of their investigation, Englishlanguage Russian outlets flooded social media with more than a dozen alternative theories: The United States poisoned Skripal to deflect attention from Russia’s geopolitical successes; Britain did it to deflect attention from Brexit; the nerve agent was accidentally released from a chemical weapons laboratory nearby; a drone did it; Yulia Skripal’s future motherin-law did it.

This skepticism blitz dominated social media conversations. In early April, the Atlantic Council found four of the six most-shared English-language articles on the case came from Kremlin media outlets. The theories are seeding doubt, even in Salisbury.