Yulia Latynina: With the Skripals the pitcher so often going to the well badly slipped up

After the poisoning of the Skripals I suggested that the original plan must have been a quiet, inconspicuous liquidation, and nobody wanted this loud embarrassment. They just didn't foresee that Yulia Skripal would be with her father. It was a bold suggestion because such things can be said only if you know the chronological details of the case. But now I can say that this broad hypothesis has been extensively confirmed. Let's begin with the fact that these two not very unprofessional guys, to say the least, stayed at a hotel for £48. They weren't Jameses Bonds, at all. They hadn't enough money for Maserati or Ritz-Carlton. 

Keep in mind the fact that they did a single reconnaissance trip to Salisbury where the house of Skripal was, being there for an hour and a half and leaving by train at 4:00 P.M. As can be seen from the circumstances of the case, on the same day Yulia Skripal’s flight arrived at Heathrow airport at 2:40 P.M. It means that she couldn’t leave the airport earlier than 3 P.M. And considering that there were about 70 miles to Salisbury from the airport, even by taxi she couldn’t get there earlier than 4:30 P.M. In other words, these people simply missed Yulia Skripal and didn’t know that she came to her father. Because of this, the whole operation was exposed, because if Skripal had died at his home alone, his death would have been shrugged off and attributed to a stroke, and nobody would have looked into it as it happened in Perepilichny’s case. All traitors would have been frightened while Putin would again have felt that he was on top because he got the better of these weaklings from Europe who can only gape and can’t say anything.

There are two things that follow from this story.

Firstly, we apparently conduct special operations the same way we build space stations – it means we make holes in a space station and then fix them with glue.

Let’s remember an assassination attempt on Babchenko. Comical aspects of this story notwithstanding, it was an absolutely real murder attempt. Some people laughed and didn’t believe that Russia could assign this task to some clown called German who behaved in such a funny way. Sorry guys, but as is now known, people who tried to kill Skripals also behaved not very professionally. So a lack of professionalism in German actually suggests that that is exactly how it happened because that’s a sort of people who always get these assignments.

I strongly suspect that the primary rationale for all these murders as well as everything else that is going on in Russia is simply a banal stealing. They always skimp on the perpetrators. Why are our negative public relations so silly? Because people involved in them are paid a pittance. The same goes for Russian killers – they’re so unprofessional because their superiors skimp on them and then fly on private jets.

Secondly, not all special operations were such failures as poisonings of Litvinenko and Skripals. Unfortunately, apparently there is a number of well-executed operations they’ve gotten away with. This number mustn’t be very large, but admittedly this pitcher doesn’t always slip up when it goes to the well.

From the intelligence’s point of view, some of these operations, to put it cynically, were quite justifiable. It might rub liberally-minded people the wrong way, but I don’t really condemn the killing of Yandarbiyev. Chechen fighters actually were Chechen terrorists and I think after Boston Marathon bombing and a couple of other demonstrative performances the world that once sympathized with them realized that this whole story was a bit more complicated than a bloody Russia indiscriminately killing peaceful Chechens, although, of course, it indeed did it indiscriminately.

But the question is why the Skripals. Firstly, the murder of the daughter is simply an outrage. Secondly, if Skripal was such a nuisance why did you swap him in the first place? In my opinion, it’s not very honest and against the rules to swap a person first and then poison him. Although personally, I don’t feel a great deal of sympathy for someone who serves in GRU and then betrays everyone he swore to serve, especially considering that Skripal began to work for a British intelligence at the beginning of the 90s which means that he wasn’t guided by any ideological ideas and motives. The problem is that Skripal and his colleagues are alike. It’s the same moral level.

There is a very small number of states that use terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy. We can remember Syria, Libya. Unfortunately, Russia appears to be among them. All this began in Georgia, as far back as the time before the Russo-Georgian War of 2008. There were constant explosions, and from time to time Georgians caught perpetrators who weren’t very professional as well.

With the Skripals, the pitcher so often going to the well badly slipped up. Americans have already imposed sanctions and will do it again in three months. And it’s well-understood that when Putin is cornered, he begins to climb inside a bottle. A new story is in the making – most likely regarding the use of chemical weapons in Syria, because Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has already warned that a provocation is about to happen involving the unnamed fighters who will use the chemical weapons against themselves in order to lay blame on Assad. To translate it from the language of Russian Ministry into a human language it means that Russia and Assad are preparing to launch an offensive operation in Idlib and are going to use the chemical weapons there because they have on other means of smoking the rebels out of multi-storey basements. Russia doesn’t like to have boots on the ground and Assad doesn’t have an army. But he has chlorine.

However, Russia has to consider that Trump isn’t Obama, who after learning about the use of chemical weapons immediately started to raise all alarms, complained a lot, promised to set a red line and in the end accepted Putin as an intermediary. Despite Trump’s affection for Putin in whom he apparently sees a kindred spirit of sorts, these kindred spirits’ interests are diverging. It’s possible that a decisive reaction of the US and an understanding that there might be a strong retaliation will deter Russia for a while.

At the same time, it’s obvious that we’ll quite soon slip up again somewhere else because it’s a Russian way of life. Now there’s no doubt about what’s going to happen to people who take to streets to protest. They will be beaten and hustled into police vans. Maybe in the near future, they would simply be killed. And what’s going to happen in the foreign policy? The answer is polonium, the Skripals, Assad and the next hacked servers. Putin doesn’t have any other instrument of foreign policy. There’s nothing to impress the world with, but he wants the world to pay attention to him.