STATE-SPONSORED assassination is nothing new. The very word “assassin” comes from a feared medieval sect located in the mountains of Syria and Iran which fiercely defended its independence by killing the leaders of states that attacked them. They later hired out their services to others.
In modern times Israel has sent killers after Palestinian targets, North Korea has murdered dissidents and the United States and UK are among Western powers who are generally believed on occasions to have — in CIA parlance “terminated with extreme prejudice” — key political leaders who resisted them. In almost all of these killings, the governments that ordered them have not responded to speculation they are responsible and at best have protested that they would never dream of doing such a thing.
But in Russia it is seems to be different. The Kremlin vigorously denies any involvement in the killings of political opponents inside the country and of dissident businessmen and defected agents abroad. But it does so in such a way that makes it almost perfectly clear it was directly responsible or completely approves of whoever was.
Moreover, Vladimir Putin has promoted legislation that effectively empowers the murder of enemies of the state. He has said he would ensure that traitors would “choke on their thirty pieces of silver”. In those circumstances the Russian denial that it had anything to do with the attempted murder in the UK two weeks ago of a former military intelligence agent who spied for the British rings hollow and is almost certainly meant to.
The British government is claiming that Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who was visiting him from Russia, were poisoned in the British city of Salisbury by a military grade chemical nerve agent, Novichok. As with the 2006 murder in London of the defected spy Alexander Litvinenko, the method used strongly suggests state-level involvement. Litvinenko was poisoned with highly-radioactive polonium which left a radiation trail by which investigators traced the movement of the two suspected assassins from and back to Russia. One of these men has since become a member of the Russian parliament. In the UK and elsewhere in Europe, there have been other unexplained deaths of Russians who for one reason or another incurred the wrath of the Kremlin.
On Wednesday Russia’s UN ambassador used a long speech to the Security Council to mock the British investigation into the Skripal attack saying its was bumbling and hapless. He recommended the UK government use Sherlock Holmes to crack the case. Separately in Moscow an official said British premier Theresa May’s claims were “insane”.
If Russia were truly innocent, these angry and taunting responses would be understandable, despite their intemperate tone. But Russia has form. Two weeks before the annexation of the Ukrainian territory of the Crimea, Vladimir Putin stood up and denied that there were Russian troops operating there. “Anyone can buy a Russian uniform,” he said. Two weeks later when the troops he denied were there had taken over Crimea, he held a triumphant victory parade at which he inspected and congratulated them. As in Soviet times, truth is now at a premium in Russia and Putin is clearly entirely content that this is so. Ferocious unreliability has become a cornerstone of Russia’s approach to the outside world which is now being factored into the way other states treat the Kremlin.
