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Nerve Agent Attack In Britain.


Stuart Galbraith

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You should do. Its a message that there are no property rights in Russia, except what Putin decides they are. And that is the precise reason why Western backers have failed to invest in your country, and why you have mobsters robbing your country blind.

 

Its the old Bolshevik Creed of 'Property is theft' modified to the Mafia code 'Property is theft, and I steal'. And they do.

 

Still, with a bit of luck all that loose change rolling about, it wont end up down the FSB's sofa and might be able to bankroll Putins abortive Eurasion Union. Best of luck with that.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11485352/Vladimir-Putin-calls-for-Eurasia-currency-union.html

Edited by Stuart Galbraith
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BTW, is any Russian on this site going to express any concern at the health of Yulia Skripal, or the decency the British Government has shown at throwing all the resources of nation in a bid to save her life? Too much to expect I suppose. Is a life of a Russian that cheap these days?

See Lavrov interview not so long ago – according to him, Britain turned down official Russian request on information about her condition and samples of substance claimed to be used against her. - in violation of Chemical Weapons Convention. I think if Britain got problems with “throwing all the resources of nation in a bid to save her life” – Rus Gov will send plane to take her home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkaybGqW0No

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/sergei-skripal-russia-nerve-agent-novichok-demands-sample-lavrov-vladimir-putin-kremlin-a8253121.html

 

Russia has told Theresa May it “is not to blame” for the nerve agent attack on former spy Sergei Skripal.

Sergei Lavrov, the country’s foreign minister, said Moscow had demanded access to samples of the nerve agent used to poison Mr Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.

Mr Lavrov said the British government had refused to provide Moscow access to materials and samples related to the case.

He called it a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which outlaws the production of chemical weapons.

Moscow was willing to cooperate with the probe but suggested the UK would be “better off” complying with its international obligations “before putting forward ultimatums," Mr Lavrov added.


On Monday, Theresa May said Mr Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, had been poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent known as Novichok, which had been developed in the Soviet Union.

She said Russia has until the end of Tuesday to explain how the substance ended up in Britain, otherwise, she said, the attack will be interpreted as an act of military aggression.

The British government will have understood that the Kremlin was unlikely to respond to Ms May’s ultimatum positively. Many in Moscow are already bracing themselves for that they see as an inevitable tightening of sanctions.

 

Sergei Stepashin, Vladimir Putin’s predecessor as FSB director and Prime Minister, also called for British authorities to hand over evidence.

“We have the relevant agreements to investigate this together,” he told the Interfax news agency.

Mr Stepashin said British security services may have been complicit in the poisoning — and were using it to undermine Russia ahead of Sunday’s presidential elections: “It seems obvious to me that this might be the primitive work of English security services. Tell me who needs this traitor in Russia?”

There could be another reason apart from elections, he added: “The World Cup is about to take start and the English hate us for the fact the competition is taking place in our country.”

Earlier in the day, Konstantin Kosachyov, head of the Committee for Foreign Affairs in the Russian upper house described British allegations as “maniacal.” Britain was well versed in blaming all kinds of “mortal sins” on Russia, he wrote on Facebook.

“Russia is being asked to justify itself even without evidence,” he said. “In queen of courts of Britain, this degradation is complete: the total presumption of guilt, when the neither court and nor prosecutor are asked to prove the case, but the accused ”

 

 

Funny how evidence becomes so important when its the Putin Regime being accused of anything, but when Putin makes any half bit accusation against Britain or America, there is no need for any evidence or sources at all.

 

Roman, why add to their stockpile. Im sure we will be happy to supply the evidence to anyone that asks, but on balance what was the result of asking Russia to assist in the litvinenko investigation? Sweet bugger all.

Edited by Stuart Galbraith
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Funny how evidence becomes so important when its the Putin Regime being accused of anything, but when Putin makes any half bit accusation against Britain or America, there is no need for any evidence or sources at all

Let me remind you about "social media evidence", "observatories for human rights" and other nice games used by West when taking important political decision that result, in some casees, in bobmings or cruise missile strikes. Sorry but it will not work this time.

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Britain isnt. OTOH, it must and now should.

 

Here is the problem with the Russian negative dialogue. You assume we are all doing these things anyway. So when we DO start doing them, you have a somewhat diminished argument. Im all for doing all the evil things Putin accuses us of doing. There is clearly no point in holding back any further if he is already acting like we are already doing them.

 

See above – our services are routinely capturing agents trained by Western powers for use against Russia. We do not need to “assume” – it is reality we are already living in.

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This was linked on the Luke Harding Twitter feed, and it has some interesting background about Novichok.

 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/12/what-is-novichok-the-russian-nerve-agent-and-the-scientist-who-revealed-it/

 

What a brave Russian scientist told me about Novichok, the nerve agent identified in the spy attack

Thanks to the Russian nerve agent “Novichok,” I once got to see the inside of an interrogation room at Lefortovo, the old KGB prison on the east side of Moscow.

It was in 1993. The Russians were not pleased that I had written an article the year before disclosing the existence of Novichok, identified Monday by British investigators as the weapon used last week in the attempted murder of former Soviet spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.

The nerve agent was top secret back then, especially sensitive because the Soviet Union, under Mikhail Gorbachev, had renounced the use and production of chemical weapons. Its existence came to light thanks to the scruples of a brave scientist named Vil Mirzayanov, who had worked at the State Union Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology. The institute was described by one of its top officials as “the leader in the technology of chemical destruction.”

On a gray September afternoon, Mirzayanov and a scientist-activist named Lev Fyodorov came by the Moscow office of the Baltimore Sun, where I was working. The Cold War was supposedly over, and Mirzayanov had been growing more and more angry over the secret weapons work. He decided to go public, and the two scientists told me that they had arranged to publish an article the next day in the Moskovsky Novosti newspaper. But, they said, they thought they could ensure some measure of security for themselves by also getting the story out in the West. After all, they reasoned, the United States and Russia were on friendly terms, American aid was crucial to Russian stability and no one should have any need of nerve agents.

They told me Russia had a nerve agent 10 times more powerful than VX, a powerful chemical weapon, and that work on it was continuing. I wrote a story that day after checking in with Western experts, who were skeptical of the claim — to put it mildly. But in the month that followed, I tracked down more scientists who worked at the institute and wrote a fuller story that named the new agent: Novichok No. 5.

I learned that research on Novichok had begun in 1987, even as the Soviet Union said it would unilaterally halt all its chemical-weapons programs. It had been developed at the institute and tested in a place called Shikhani, in southeastern Russia, and in the Nukus region of Uzbekistan. I spoke to one scientist, Andrei Zheleznyakov, who had been exposed to a minute amount of Novichok in a lab accident five years prior. He staggered out after the mishap, his vision, as I wrote, “seared by brilliant colors and hallucinations.” Zheleznyakov never fully recovered, and he died shortly after I interviewed him.

 

The Russian government, by then under Boris Yeltsin, said that it had never renounced doing research on chemical weapons strictly for defensive purposes. It said Russia was not stockpiling Novichok, which explains why it had not felt obligated to report its existence under chemical-weapons conventions.

“We played the game under the agreed-upon rules,” I was told by Gen. Anatoly Kuntsevich, Yeltsin's adviser on chemical and biological disarmament.

In 1993, Mirzayanov was arrested and charged with divulging state secrets. (He was not allowed to know the specifics of the charge, which was itself a state secret.) He was held for months in pretrial detention. During that time, I was summoned by the successor agency to the KGB to appear for an interrogation at Lefortovo. I was allowed to bring my own translator, so I asked Andrei Mironov, a mutual acquaintance of me and Mirzayanov, to accompany me. He was a former dissident and political prisoner who had no fear of the security services.

My interrogator was Capt. Viktor Shkarin. He asked if I minded if he smoked. I said I did, which seemed to agitate him quite a lot. The interrogation room smelled strongly of old cooked cabbage.

It quickly became evident that Shkarin was trying to maneuver me into giving testimony he could use against Mirzayanov. He would ask a question; Mironov would translate it — though I could generally follow along; I would answer in English; Mironov would translate that, frequently giving me advice on how to answer. Then Shkarin would turn to an ancient word processor and write out a question that wasn't really the question he had just asked, along with an answer that was quite far from the answer I had given. Then we would fall to arguing and negotiating over language. This continued all day. In the end I refused to sign the protocol of the interrogation.

Shkarin threatened to keep me in detention, but Mironov said he would sign it as my interpreter — and it's a good thing he did. Months later, when Mirzayanov was on trial and the Russian government was desperately looking for an excuse to drop the charges against him — the United States and Germany were pressuring Moscow over the case — Mironov was able to use his standing as signatory to declare that my protocol was an unfaithful transcript.

Presto. Mirzayanov walked free — and walked home, because he didn't have bus fare.

Sometime after that, Mirzayanov moved to New Jersey and took a position at Rutgers University. In 2000, I wrote a follow-up story about a joint U.S.-Russian program to destroy the last of Russia's chemical weapons. Apparently, it didn't take.

 

 

 

Mirzayanov wrote a book about his experiences, not least the storage quality of the Army facilities which keep leaking chemicals into the outside environment poisoning many people. One to put on the Amazon list perhaps.

Edited by Stuart Galbraith
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Its existence came to light thanks to the scruples of a brave scientist named Vil Mirzayanov, who had worked at the State Union Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology.

 

Traitor! He deserves to die a horrible lingering death just as Putin says all traitors to the Motherland must die! And if it happens, it's the Ukrainians' fault. The West spies on us so we, I mean the Ukrainians, have every right to launch a chemical attack in the heart of a western city! Dastardly Ukrainians!

 

Did I cover everything?

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You ticked all the boxes Jeff, except you didnt mention enemy of the people or that its all an Mi6 plot. Otherwise, very good. The lubyanka would be proud of you.

 

It would be an irony (and excessively horrible one) if they did. Putin bangs on about how much he appreciates the Russian environment. Mirzayanov is the one who pointed out how the decaying Chemical stocks were poisoning the hell out of it. They would have done well to have given him a hero of Russia medal, not boot him out the country.

 

Its like with Skripal.They slag him off as a traitor. The man was a paratrooper (and there is no such thing as a soft Russian Paratrooper) and was one of the first into Afghanistan, and so distinguished himself there that the GRU recruited him. Yet he is an enemy of the people, whereas Putin, who never did anything more dangerous than suffer paper cuts in his office in Dresden is a bloody hero. You couldn't make it up.

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Incidentally, there here is Luke Harding's Twitter feed. There is a lot of good stuff on there, not least the American Presidents reluctance to say anything on the present situation.

https://mobile.twitter.com/lukeharding1968

 

Well, Rex Tillerson said something yesterday. And today he was fired.

 

 

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters Monday evening that the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain last week "clearly came from Russia" and "certainly will trigger a response."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/03/12/tillerson-us-outraged-by-poisoning-ex-spy-that-clearly-came-from-russia.html

 

NO COLLUSION! :P

Edited by Der Zeitgeist
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I thought you were joking. That must have been some Compromat tape.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5495087/Trump-FIRES-Rex-Tillerson-secretary-state.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490

 

Well thats us on our own again. How very 1940. :D

Edited by Stuart Galbraith
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It would be an irony (and excessively horrible one) if they did. Putin bangs on about how much he appreciates the Russian environment. Mirzayanov is the one who pointed out how the decaying Chemical stocks were poisoning the hell out of it. They would have done well to have given him a hero of Russia medal, not boot him out the country.

 

Seems to me you are lost in time. Let me remind you Mirzoyanov have left Russia in 1996 and is living in USA since then, pretending to be “President of Independent Tatarstan in excile” (to add to image of crazy scientist). Putin was at that time mid-level bureaucrat in StPete (and participant of National Democratic Institute for International Affairs training programs).

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Marek Tucan On top of what Briganza said, there is also the delivery method. Targets may have spent less time than anticipated in contact with the poison, for whatever reason (depends on how it was asministered) or did not get the full dose for another reason.

 

 

If the objective was to kill the target the surest method would be a pistol shot to the head. The British need to release the surveillance video of the assassins and turn over samples of the nerve agent to other countries, including all of the members of the security council. Then, see where that evidence goes.

 

Stuart For starters, we can invite the Ukrainian special forces to the Tiptoe Club at Hereford, and strongly encourage them to launch cross border raids.

 

 

I wouldn’t get too many illusions about how far Ukraine is going to go over this.

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Well that was a nice world. I'm going to glug my good booze. Look forward to the nuclear exchange.

 

ETA:- Or not. Yet more empty British emptiness. Tres empty.

 

It's hilarious how much of the Russian playbook you've adopted (which is kinda the Trumper playbook too). "Fake news --> OK, so what, everyone does it --> who cares you're a bunch of pussies anyway."

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Its like with Skripal.They slag him off as a traitor. The man was a paratrooper (and there is no such thing as a soft Russian Paratrooper) and was one of the first into Afghanistan, and so distinguished himself there that the GRU recruited him. Yet he is an enemy of the people, whereas Putin, who never did anything more dangerous than suffer paper cuts in his office in Dresden is a bloody hero. You couldn't make it up.

Are western secret services accepting any hero as part of their spy exchange programs? As far as I remember Smowden is also army veteran, but he is hunted by USA and, if caught, is strongly unlikely to ever came out of jail alive (unlike Skripal who only got ~13 years term)

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It would be an irony (and excessively horrible one) if they did. Putin bangs on about how much he appreciates the Russian environment. Mirzayanov is the one who pointed out how the decaying Chemical stocks were poisoning the hell out of it. They would have done well to have given him a hero of Russia medal, not boot him out the country.

 

Seems to me you are lost in time. Let me remind you Mirzoyanov have left Russia in 1996 and is living in USA since then, pretending to be “President of Independent Tatarstan in excile” (to add to image of crazy scientist). Putin was at that time mid-level bureaucrat in StPete (and participant of National Democratic Institute for International Affairs training programs).

 

 

He was charged with revealing state secrets in 1992. He was released in 1993. He went to the US in 1996. I dont suppose it was because he had the Popular Scientist of Russia award.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vil_Mirzayanov

Mirzayanov was released, but keep under house arrest and observation. When allowed to do so by Russian authorities, he relocated to the United States where he presently resides,[9] taking a position at Rutgers University in New Jersey.[6]

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...

Its like with Skripal.They slag him off as a traitor. The man was a paratrooper (and there is no such thing as a soft Russian Paratrooper) and was one of the first into Afghanistan, and so distinguished himself there that the GRU recruited him. Yet he is an enemy of the people...

 

There is your problem, you again try to paint something this complex as clear cut, black/white case.

Benedict Arnold, Philippe Petain, Milan Nedic and many more say you can be both a hero and a traitor.

 

PS. Other than that, since I don't live in UK or Russia, nor do I particularly GAF about either keep going.

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...

Its like with Skripal.They slag him off as a traitor. The man was a paratrooper (and there is no such thing as a soft Russian Paratrooper) and was one of the first into Afghanistan, and so distinguished himself there that the GRU recruited him. Yet he is an enemy of the people...

 

There is your problem, you again try to paint something this complex as clear cut, black/white case.

Benedict Arnold, Philippe Petain, Milan Nedic and many more say you can be both a hero and a traitor.

 

PS. Other than that, since I don't live in UK or Russia, nor do I particularly GAF about either keep going.

 

 

You dont GAF about anything, other than what happens in Serbia. Fair enough, just dont kid yourself it wont happen there next.

 

And yes, im perfectly aware there are many different levels to a human psyche, a point Le Carre has illustrated very well. But im not the one that accused him of being a traitor worthy of execution.

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Marek Tucan On top of what Briganza said, there is also the delivery method. Targets may have spent less time than anticipated in contact with the poison, for whatever reason (depends on how it was asministered) or did not get the full dose for another reason.

 

 

If the objective was to kill the target the surest method would be a pistol shot to the head. The British need to release the surveillance video of the assassins and turn over samples of the nerve agent to other countries, including all of the members of the security council. Then, see where that evidence goes.

 

Stuart For starters, we can invite the Ukrainian special forces to the Tiptoe Club at Hereford, and strongly encourage them to launch cross border raids.

 

 

I wouldn’t get too many illusions about how far Ukraine is going to go over this.

 

 

Up to them of course. It will surely be impressed on their imagination that if they can use nerve agent in Britain, they can use it in Ukraine too, so the sooner they get ivan off their territory the better.

 

OTOH, we can continue doing nothing at all, in which case things are assured of getting worse. Ive been proven right when ive said this year on year, and yet the penny has yet to drop.

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Novichok inventor says British public could be at risk 'For Years'.

 

https://news.sky.com/story/spy-poisoning-novichok-inventor-says-hundreds-could-be-at-risk-for-years-11287880

 

There has just been a press conference which has given a few more details on the timeline of the incident. Ill post it up later when I can find a link detailing it all.

Edited by Stuart Galbraith
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In any case we will likely see all those anti-EU and anti-NATO parties in EU (which seem to have certain relationship with Russia more often than not - and with UKIP) to step up to hinder any EU countries support, lukewarm it may be.

 

I've looked around a bit, and for now there's deafening silence on the whole affair from the usual fringenut circles on the left and right here; the only comment at a board that's AfD Central was a wink-nudge "well everybody knows that Putin always keeps a dose of polonium or sarin for traitors". They are probably too busy debating a recent string of allegedly Kurdish attacks on Turkish mosques and other installations in Germany over the Syrian business, suspecting that a 15-year-old who stabbed his 14-year-old probable girlfriend to death in Berlin is an immigrant, and generally discussing how Angela Merkel will finally destroy Germany now that the coalition agreement for the next government has been signed.

 

Or everybody is waiting for the talking points to be disseminated how this was a false-flag operation by the Deep State using American drones controlled by P-8s operating from Ukrainian-controlled territory to distract from the fact that Britain is being taken over by gay pedophile Muslim feminazi communists at the behest of the EU. I'm sure appropriate UAV footage, satellite imagery and intercepted phone conversations will be supplied as proof shortly. The best I've seen on the wider net so far is that Skripal may have kept the agent at his home to use it against possible intruders, which you gotta admit is a totally practical means of repelling the odd burglar.

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