Which might still happen, though whether that person is really responsible or just a scapegoat will be the next open question. It’s just lies and subterfuge all the way down.
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It is not that nothing is what it seems in this timeline, it is that everything is not what it seems.
I hoped they would give up after the disaster at Salisbury.
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I certainly had no idea which poison was used, so…
Yep. Eventually some up and comer will rub this shit on his smartphone.
No tears.
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It should also be mentioned that the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia was a carefully crafted message to Trump by Putin. Putin making it clear that a man and his daughter will never be safe if he crosses him. These events are never simple assassinations. They are messages to a wider audience from a KGB agent who is practiced in this strategy.
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It was a screwup. They carelessly disposed of the delivery mechanism, literally dropping it in a bin close to the target, leaking information about their methods and making the world wary of them.
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Think of that reaction as the Russian government’s official position then.
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The only thing that more obviously indicates the Russian government tried to kill someone is to use polonium, given that it requires the resources of a state to produce, at enormous expense, such that it would have been impossible for anyone else to do it.
This still seems like the sort of thing that gets used, normally at least, to advertise “Yes, I killed him. What are you going to do about it?” Except in this case, Russian doctors were so desperate to provide some cover for Putin, however implausible it was, with their whole “It’s natural causes! His blood sugar got too low” explanation. Maybe that was just part of the game, though.
I don’t think he’s the least bit worried about that, as my understanding of that court is that they don’t have jurisdiction to do anything about him. So he can be as obvious as he wants because the only things he has to worry about are being invaded (not going to happen) or deposed by internal factions (which can’t happen if he poisons them all first).
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Maintaining the thinnest veneer of deniability for his deeds also makes it easier for him to continue trade and diplomatic relations with other countries. For example,
Q: President Trump, how can you continue to work with Putin after he’s murdered his political adversaries and put bounties on American troops?
A: Enough with the fake news already. He assured me he didn’t do it.
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I call that implausible deniability.
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The point is “killing people in such a way that everyone knows it was Putin but Putin doesn’t have to openly cop to it” is advantageous to his position.
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Yeah, that could happen.
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“Hey, boss, can I slap sanctions on you?”
“Nyet“
“Aww!”
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Putin needs to understand his audience better. That is about six layers too much subterfuge for the message to penetrate President Person Man Woman Camera TV’s very stable genius brain.
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Yes, he would have a reason to try and punish the perpetrator, but would anyone believe it was them if it happened? I know I would view it them as a scapegoat. There is some evidence that non-Russian countries have at least small amounts of Novichock agents, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-russia-chemicalweapons-german/wests-knowledge-of-novichok-came-from-sample-secured-in-1990s-report-idUSKCN1IH2HC and the US was involved in decontamination efforts in some former Soviet Block countries and there have been some publicly announced synthesis efforts outside of that. I agree the balance of probabilities still favors it being an official Russian government act, but there is enough fuzziness that I wouldn’t be comfortable using words like slam dunk.
The UK recovered a (relatively) huge quantity of novichok from the botched attack in Salisbury. A whole perfume bottle full.
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He’ll condemn Germany for slandering such a strong leader. Simply the best really. Putin assured him is is all fake news. Whatever Putin says is always more accurate than any sort of contradictory evidence. It’s all a Biden plot. Antifa.
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Oh, come on, most of the people who were poisoned with this stuff had some pre-existing condition, like diabetes and stuff like that. They just happened to have a toxic nerve agent in their body at the same time they died. /s
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