From Russia with Blood. Heidi Blake
tension and public alarm over an accusation of political assassination that would be unlikely to stand up to judicial scrutiny.
As Russia’s activities in the wider world grew more blatantly hostile, the British authorities had a new consideration to add to the calculus. Fear. The government’s security advisers began cautioning that the Kremlin could inflict massive harm on Britain by unleashing cyberattacks, destabilizing the economy, or mobilizing elements of Britain’s large Russian population to cause disruption. Deep police funding cuts following the financial crisis of 2008 had weakened the UK’s law enforcement capabilities, and a decade of focus on jihadist terror had withered the institutional expertise on Russia within the security and intelligence services, leaving the nation exposed and vulnerable. Defense chiefs warned that Putin’s modernized military far outstripped the diminished capabilities of the austerity-ravaged British armed forces, and there were concerns that Russia could be creeping toward a full-scale conflict with the West as its actions became more overtly hostile. Suddenly, the specter of general war with Russia was being discussed in the corridors of Whitehall. If it came, the mandarins agreed, it could happen very rapidly—and Britain would be unprepared. This was no longer just about business. There were genuine existential threats to consider when the government calculated its response to Russian operations on its soil.
Putin had been flexing his muscles more boldly since the murder of Litvinenko. He set his weapons modernization plans in motion within weeks of the killing, quickly followed by a wave of crippling cyberattacks on Estonia, and embarked upon his first foreign military adventure with the invasion of Georgia in 2008. Cyberattacks on Germany, France, and the United States were to come, accompanied by Russia’s increasingly overt financing and support for far-right and separatist groups across Europe. But as the aggressions grew more audacious, the British government found itself stuck between its more hawkish American ally and European partners who remained heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas and who had no appetite for a fight. The invasion of eastern Ukraine was the tipping point.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March of 2014 marked the end of any serious hope that Putin could be coaxed into the liberal fold. Russia was suspended from the G8, the NATO countries ceased all political and military cooperation with Moscow, and the United States and European Union imposed scorching sanctions that, coupled with the slump in global oil prices, threatened to cripple the Russian economy. Undeterred, Putin pressed on with his latest adventure, sending tanks and heavy weapons over the border into the turbulent Donetsk and Luhansk regions and sparking a full-blown armed conflict with the Ukrainian government. Further waves of sanctions followed. Then pro-Russian forces shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, over eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and fifteen crew members on board—and only then did the British government finally relent and announce a public inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko.
Even after that, the UK authorities continued to suppress evidence of the full scale of Russia’s killing campaign on British soil. It would take an indiscriminate chemical weapons attack on the streets of Britain to force the government to confront the menace it had long ignored.
By the time Sergei and Yulia Skripal collapsed in Salisbury, the West had finally woken up to the severity of the Russian threat. The attack came hot on the heels of a series of jaw-dropping moves by the Kremlin: brazen meddling in the US election in favor of Donald Trump; interference in democracies across Europe with state-sponsored hacking, internet trolling, and financing for extremist groups; an attempted coup in Montenegro; increasingly malignant cyberattacks on Western governments; and a military intervention in support of the Syrian regime as it unleashed wave after wave of chemical weapons attacks on its own people. Russia’s activities amounted to an all-out asymmetric war of subversion, using the full spectrum of state powers to disrupt and destabilize its Western enemies.
At the same time, Britain’s intelligence agencies were facing scrutiny from their US counterparts over their failure to get to grips with the escalating spate of Russian assassinations in the UK. US intelligence officials had been watching the pattern of deaths from across the Atlantic with mounting alarm, concerned that it could spread to American shores. They had for years been sharing intelligence with MI6 connecting the deaths of the men in Berezovsky’s circle and others to Russia and had looked on with consternation as every case was shut down by the authorities without investigation. Fears that Britain’s quiet complicity could be emboldening Putin to ramp up his killing campaign had intensified in 2015, following the strange death in Washington, DC, of Mikhail Lesin, a onetime Kremlin henchman who was preparing to start talking to the US Department of Justice. Relations between senior Russia officials at MI6 and their CIA counterparts were becoming increasingly strained.
Then in 2017, the summer before Skripal’s collapse, a team of investigative journalists at BuzzFeed News published a series of stories laying bare the pattern of Russian assassinations on British soil––and exposing the government’s attempts to suppress the evidence.
When Russia struck again, the prime minister no longer had any option but to take a stand. But the tough rhetoric and waves of diplomatic expulsions that followed the nerve-agent attack on the Skripals did not perturb a gleeful Putin as he careered toward reelection. Just hours after Theresa May accused Russia of a state-sponsored assassination attempt on British soil, the body of another Kremlin enemy was discovered. Nikolai Glushkov was a close friend and business associate of Berezovsky’s and an avowed foe of Putin. He was found at his home on the London outskirts, strangled with a dog leash. Counterterrorism officers from Scotland Yard quickly took command of the investigation, but the killer had not left a trace.
Meanwhile, Sergei and Yulia Skripal were making a miraculous recovery. That was thanks to the expertise of the scientists at Porton Down and the state-of-the-art treatments they had developed for nerve-agent poisoning. Detective Sergeant Bailey, the off-duty doctor and nurse, and the children from the green were all discharged from the hospital, and when they were well enough, the Skripals were moved to a secure location to complete their recovery. A multimillion-pound military cleanup operation was under way in nine Salisbury locations that had been contaminated with the nerve agent, and it seemed for a while that the British authorities might have contained the crisis without any lives being lost. Then, four months after the initial attack, news broke that two more people in Salisbury had been hospitalized with symptoms of Novichok poisoning.
Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were a couple in their midforties who had fallen on hard times. On a balmy summer day at the end of June, Rowley had found what he thought would make an elegant gift for his girlfriend while out rifling through local trash cans and dumpsters: a gold Nina Ricci perfume box containing a small bottle with a long nozzle attached to the lid. He took it home and gave it to Sturgess, who sprayed it on both wrists.
The bottle did not contain perfume. It was the vessel that had been used by Russia’s assassins to transport their Novichok to Salisbury, and Sturgess had doused herself with ten times the amount of nerve agent used on the Skripals. She died in the hospital just over a week later. Some of the Novichok had splashed onto Rowley’s hands, but he narrowly pulled through and woke from his coma two days after his girlfriend had died. There were no pallbearers at Sturgess’s funeral. The government’s public-health watchdog had put special measures in place to protect the mourners from contamination.
Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command had deployed its finest officers to hunt the state agents who had deployed the Novichok, but for six months there was no sign that their inquiry had turned up any leads. Then, on September 5, the country’s premier police force announced two men were being charged with the attempted assassination of the Skripals. They were identified as two serving members of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, who had entered Britain under false names. Police released photos of both men along with CCTV stills of the grinning assassins arriving at Gatwick Airport, traveling to a shabby hotel in East London, and carrying out a reconnaissance mission to Salisbury before returning to the city on March 4 to deploy the nerve agent.
A spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry dismissed the fruits of the British investigation as a “big fake.” Then Putin announced that Scotland Yard’s two suspects had been found living innocently in Russia, declaring that they were “civilians” and would be coming