Russia had hit on the issue of campaigning for access to the Skripals a couple of weeks into the affair. It was a way of simultaneously doing the right thing, in terms of looking after their citizens, while trying to find out more about their condition, and make the British look bad. But of course these appeals also played another role, as part of the international battle to set the narrative of what had happened. By emphasizing their inability to get consular access they could suggest the British were hiding the Skripals, imprisoning them even, as part of a sinister plot. Inasmuch as there was a coherent single counter-narrative – rather than many different ones – this version suggested the British had carried out the attack, with material made at Porton Down, in order to discredit Russia.
It is not always easy to distinguish the official aspects of the Kremlin information war here. For in the febrile social-media battleground there were rival claims from Salisbury ‘truthers’ or indeed their opponents, Putin-haters, that were quite unconnected to the official strategies of the Kremlin or Downing Street but might occasionally borrow a good line from them.
British internet users claimed that Russia had murdered Skripal’s son or brother, or the whole list compiled by Buzzfeed of thirteen who had died in suspicious circumstances. These charges, often made anonymously on social media, had nothing to do with the official narrative or briefings we were getting. Indeed you could argue they were a distraction from the main event – Skripal – in that officials or ministers had to address them.
This unofficial speculation soared after the discovery on 12 March of the body of Nikolai Glushkov, a friend of the late Boris Berezovsky. Glushkov, found murdered in his home in a southern London suburb, had also been a critic of Putin’s and it was quickly established that he had been strangled. He had been a director of Aeroflot, and was, up until his death, involved in a long-running legal battle with them. The action had nearly bankrupted him, and friends accused the airline of pursuing it for political reasons.
The idea of a link with the Salisbury attack just a few days before seemed to some to herald a general onslaught on Russians in the UK. From the start though the police cautioned against making any link with the Skripal affair.
On the other side of the social-media battlefield there were many who had nothing to do with Russia expressing scepticism that Russia had targeted the Skripals. From the supporters of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn decrying the similarities with Britain’s journey to war in Iraq to those who could see some connection between Skripal and the Trump dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, many of those rubbishing the Whitehall version of what had happened were not following Kremlin talking points. Having said all that, there were clearly information strategies deployed by the opposing governments that fed into the wider arena, with lines even being used unwittingly by many who debated the issue.
Some of the most revealing Russian responses came in the initial aftermath of the attack. They followed a similar pattern to those after the murder of Litvinenko and some of the high-profile killings in Russia itself. They suggested that Skripal knew only old secrets and wasn’t worthy of assassination, or that things never end well for traitors. The Russian Ambassador to Ireland for example told British radio listeners on 8 March, ‘For some reason, the British territory is very dangerous for certain sorts of people.’ First Channel presenter Kirill Kleymyonov noted, ‘The profession of a traitor is one of the most dangerous in the world,’ adding that there seemed to be something odd about Britain. ‘Maybe it’s the climate, but in recent years there have been too many strange incidents with grave outcomes there.’ If the aim of attacking Skripal was to send a message to Russians, well, there it was right there: spy for Britain and it will end badly.
During those last days before the election other ideas were planted too, and they were very helpful to a president, so long in office, who might have feared that a combination of apathy and domestic economic concerns could undermine the fresh mandate he was seeking. His campaign was worried that Putin would not win 70/70, which meant 70 per cent of the vote with a turnout of 70 per cent. Russian political analyst and former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov argues that the Salisbury poisoning succeeded admirably in creating a distraction from domestic concerns while reinforcing long-standing messages about Western Russophobia. ‘Among Russian political experts it’s common knowledge that this high result of this last election happened due to this conflict with England over Skripal,’ he told the BBC, ‘foreign policy again dominated the agenda so all these domestic issues again found themselves at the backstage.’
As Gallyamov’s analysis suggests, his fellow citizens drew certain conclusions from Salisbury, even while their government denied it and propagated so many counter-theories. Reading between the lines and making deductions from what’s not said are skills any politically aware Russian learns. Someone I’ve known for many years, a European who had done Russian government work over the years and is therefore not quoted here by name, told me this about his contacts with Russian foreign policy and security officials in Moscow in the days following Salisbury:
Sometimes, like after the murder of [opposition leader Boris] Nemtsov, there seems to be genuine surprise and things are said about needing to get to the bottom of it. With Skripal there was no pretence or attempt to deny it at all.
While the Kremlin-friendly media gave airtime or column inches to all manner of alternative theories, the one story you do not see in their output during the weeks after Salisbury is coverage suggesting Russian intelligence agencies did indeed poison Skripal or the ‘how we did it’ sort of feature. In a British tabloid, by contrast, a successful drone strike against a jihadist in Syria would generate copy about unpiloted aircraft, the war against the militants, and various other topics. You will look in vain in March or April for the Russian story interviewing former KGB operatives giving their take, exploring past examples of poisoning (even the well-attested ones from the Soviet period), and so on. It’s understood by Russian journalists that you don’t go there.
At the political level too there were certain messages that were notable by their absence, for example, ‘We take these charges seriously and have ordered urgent inspections of our chemical laboratories in order to rule out the possibility that any nerve agent was stolen.’ Even simple expressions of sympathy for the Skripals, which did come later from President Putin or the Russian Embassy in London, were largely absent at the beginning.
While the messages given or not given are undoubtedly important in the way Russians process a story they can hardly be said to constitute evidence and from an early stage the Russian response aimed to expose the weakness of the UK’s case, even poking fun at it. When Theresa May suggested in the Commons on 12 March that it was ‘highly likely Russia’ that was responsible she was relaying the intelligence she’d received and evidently stating a view formed just a few days into what was obviously going to be a long police investigation. However the Russians seized on the term and #HighlyLikely and #HighlyLikelyRussia became internet memes – a joke about how their country got blamed for everything.