Did Putin Order the Salisbury Hit?

Guest Post by Patrick Buchanan

Britain has yet to identify the assassin who tried to murder the double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, England.

But Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson knows who ordered the hit.

“We think it overwhelmingly likely that it was (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s) decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the U.K.”

“Unforgivable,” says Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov of the charge, which also defies “common sense.” On Sunday, Putin echoed Peskov: “It is just sheer nonsense, complete rubbish, to think that anyone in Russia could do anything like that in the run-up to the presidential election and the World Cup. … It’s simply unthinkable.”

Putin repeated Russia’s offer to assist in the investigation.

But Johnson is not backing down; he is doubling down.

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“We gave the Russians every opportunity to come up with an alternative hypothesis … and they haven’t,” said Johnson. “We actually have evidence … that Russia has not only been investigating the delivery of nerve agents for the purposes of assassination but has also been creating and stockpiling Novichok,” the poison used in Salisbury.

Why Russia is the prime suspect is understandable. Novichok was created by Russia’s military decades ago, and Skripal, a former Russian intel officer, betrayed Russian spies to MI6.

But what is missing here is the Kremlin’s motive for the crime.

Skripal was convicted of betraying Russian spies in 2006. He spent four years in prison and was exchanged in 2010 for Russian spies in the U.S. If Putin wanted Skripal dead as an example to all potential traitors, why didn’t he execute him while he was in Kremlin custody?

Why wait until eight years after Skripal had been sent to England? And how would this murder on British soil advance any Russian interest?

Putin is no fool. A veteran intelligence agent, he knows that no rival intel agency such as the CIA or MI6 would trade spies with Russia if the Kremlin were to go about killing them after they have been traded.

“Cui bono?” runs the always relevant Ciceronian question. “Who benefits” from this criminal atrocity?

Certainly, in this case, not Russia, not the Kremlin, not Putin.

All have taken a ceaseless beating in world opinion and Western media since the Skripals were found comatose, near death, on that bench outside a mall in Salisbury.

Predictably, Britain’s reaction has been rage, revulsion and retaliation. Twenty-three Russian diplomats, intelligence agents in their London embassy, have been expelled. The Brits have been treating Putin as a pariah and depicting Russia as outside the circle of civilized nations.

Russia is “ripping up the international rulebook,” roared Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson. Asked how Moscow might respond to the expulsions, Williamson retorted: Russia should “go away and shut up.”

Putin sympathizers, including Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, have been silenced or savaged as appeasers for resisting the rush to judgment.

The Americans naturally came down on the side of their oldest ally, with President Donald Trump imposing new sanctions.

We are daily admonished that Putin tried to tip the 2016 election to Trump. But if so, why would Putin order a public assassination that would almost compel Trump to postpone his efforts at a rapprochement?

Who, then, are the beneficiaries of this atrocity?

Is it not the coalition — principally in our own capital city — that bears an endemic hostility to Russia and envisions America’s future role as a continuance of its Cold War role of containing and corralling Russia until we can achieve regime change in Moscow?

What should Trump’s posture be? Stand by our British ally but insist privately on a full investigation and convincing proof before taking any irreversible action.

Was this act really ordered by Putin and the Kremlin, who have not only denied it but condemned it?

Or was it the work of rogue agents who desired the consequences that they knew the murder of Skripal would produce — a deeper and more permanent split between Russia and the West?

Only a moron could not have known what the political ramifications of such an atrocity as this would be on U.S.-British-Russian relations.

And before we act on Boris Johnson’s verdict — that Putin ordered it — let us recall:

The Spanish, we learned, did not actually blow up the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898, which ignited the Spanish-American War.

The story of North Vietnamese gunboats attacking U.S. destroyers, which led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and 58,000 dead Americans in Vietnam, proved not to be entirely accurate.

We went to war in Iraq in 2003 to disarm it of weapons of mass destruction we later discovered Saddam Hussein did not really have.

Some 4,500 U.S. dead and tens of thousands of wounded paid for that rush to judgment. And some of those clamoring for war then are visible in the vanguard of those clamoring for confronting Russia.

Before we set off on Cold War II with Russia — leading perhaps to the shooting war we avoided in Cold War I — let’s try to get this one right.

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steve
steve

Just another idiotic move on the “Grand Chessboard” by a failing nation state.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran

Which one?

SmallerGovNow
SmallerGovNow

Stop poking the f’ing bear! Chip

kokoda the Deplorable Raccoon and I-LUV-CO2
kokoda the Deplorable Raccoon and I-LUV-CO2
Iska Waran
Iska Waran

There’s at least as good a chance that Brennan ordered it as there is that Putin did.

pyrrhus
pyrrhus

The formula for Novichok is publicly available, so no doubt the Deep State has it…However, Novichok is so deadly that any release would have killed everyone within the vicinity, including the perp. London has refused to turn over a sample of the alleged nerve agent, or allowed inspection of the purported “victims”, so Boris Johnson and Theresa May are lying….

hardscrabble farmer

So they let him out of prison in Russia so they can kill him with a very specific and easily identifiable kind of Russian nerve agent in London?

Was that the plan?

Really?

OJ Simpson showed more discretion.

Most people are either stupid or ill informed and those who have the intelligence to pick up on the crimes being committed in their names by their own government are censored heavily. This was a set up for the mouth-breathers in the audience. Got to whip ups some anti-Russian hysteria to deflect from the complete and abject failure of the current power structure.

Gilnut
Gilnut

HS,
Most people actively resist opening their eyes because it breaks their belief that they live in the “land of the free”, and they just can’t handle that. I know, unfortunately I’m married to one but she’s opening her eyes ever so slowly but still can’t force herself to fully face the thruth of ‘today’. Cognitive dissonance is a strong force indeed, worse than any drug addiction that exists.

Gator
Gator

Not only all of what you mentioned, they also let me live in London, under his own name, where they could readily find him any time, for the last 8 years. And, at the worst possible time, decided to kill him. Putin is often accused of being a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. I see no purpose in killing him now. It’s hard to fathom he possessed any useful information that he hasn’t already given the British and American governments. Sure, there’s always the ‘pour le encouragar les autres’ motive, but if that was the case, why let him go in the first place, and then wait 8 years and do it now when the timing is terrible? Plus, as Buchanan said, if Russia killed the spies it traded with other countries, no one will ever make that deal with them again.

Oncefired
Oncefired

Read some where that Iran was playing with the stuff, but can’t think of any advantage they would gain. Russia actually stopped making this stuff because it was killing their top scientists. Pretty Nasty and hard to contain stuff!

overthecliff
overthecliff

In other news, the mother ship is expected to emerge from behind the planet Zogon as it passes close to Earth. It will land and kidnap humans to be used in scientific studies on Zogon.

Who benefits from this story?

Anonymous
Anonymous

Too many people and factions with something to gain by blaming this on Putin to draw any conclusions about who actually did it without something specific and conclusive to offer for evidence, something which hasn’t been given yet.

pyrrhus
pyrrhus

We don’t even know if this “attack” happened…..

Southern Sage
Southern Sage

The accusations against Putin are transparently absurd. The Russian government had nothing whatsoever to do with this incident. It is quite obvious who the real culprits are: the Russian “oligarchs”, almost all Jews, who he kicked out of Russia after they looted the country and then tried to use their ill-gotten wealth to buy control of the Russian government (Hmm…sounds familiar). If I had to guess this was the “Russian” (again, really Jews), with a bit of help from the Israelis. They are desperate to destory ties between Russia and the West and slither their way back into power in Russia. They also want revenge. The saying, “As long as a Jew’s memory”, was made up for a reason.

Don’t fall for this Neo-Conservative bullshit.

RiNS

Does it really matter. The Brits ain’t gonna do shit.
They will piss and moan but at end of day nobody wants to take on Moscow.
Besides that Skipral guy betrayed his country. Fuck him.

He deserved worse than he got.

Putin doesn’t have to give the order. Shit just happens.
This traitor crossed the bear, got the paw and a few claws to boot..

AC
AC

The Brits want an alternative hypothesis? Fine.

The UK government poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, for political reasons. The UK has insurmountable (self-inflicted) internal problems and is facing an ethnic civil war, and is therefore desperate for a foreign conflict before their internal problems destroy the country.

It is too late, of course. They will try anyway.

prusmc
prusmc

Hard to believe the ethnic in the potential ethnic civil war that AC hints at will rally to the side of Queen and Country in a war against an outside enemy?

MrLiberty
MrLiberty

No, they misunderstood. What he ordered was the Salisbury STEAK.

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The hypon
The hypon

go to the blog Moon of Alabama. There’s a very good article about this.

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