For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
#1597857
Paul_Sengupta wrote:
PaulB wrote:It was said on the (BBC One) news earlier this evening that the daughter had arrived from Russia the day before the incident. Is it possible that she unwittingly brought the agent with her and when they opened whatever it was it contaminated them? (Or is my imagination on overtime?)


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/15/suitcase-spy-poisoning-plot-nerve-agent-planted-luggage-sergei/
The nerve agent that poisoned the Russian spy Sergei Skripal was planted in his daughter’s suitcase before she left Moscow, intelligence agencies now believe.
Senior sources have told the Telegraph they are convinced the Novichok nerve agent was hidden in the luggage of Yulia Skripal, the double agent’s 33-year-old daughter.
They are working on the theory that the toxin was impregnated in an item of clothing or cosmetics or else in a gift that was opened in his house in Salisbury, meaning Miss Skripal was deliberately targeted to get at her father.


I have to agree with Jezza Corbyn. This could be nothing to do with the Putin regime.

If we believe there is plenty of former USSR Plutonium to be traded to any terroist organisation willing to pay, there is probably plenty of old (we are talking 30 year old) USSR nerve agents on the black market. What links any of this to Putin?

Dangerous games being played.
#1597860
TBH Bob (anon). If you can only extrapolate & provide with half baked theories simply on 'intuition' &/or what the ragged Press surmise, you too are playing dangerous politics defending Mr, Corbyn.
NATO accepts & acted on H.M Gov's carewful findings: I support them too & certainly not going guess why Mr. C equivocates !

mike hallam
#1597862
kanga wrote:Who in which of these, alone or together, was in any position to create, let alone execute, such a plot ?

I really hope the above post was meant in jest, but there was no smiley

I mentioned Millwall so no smiley was needed.
But I only mentioned them once so I thought I'd got away with it.
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#1597863
Bob Upanddown wrote:..

I have to agree with Jezza Corbyn. This could be nothing to do with the Putin regime.

If we believe there is plenty of former USSR Plutonium to be traded to any terroist organisation willing to pay, there is probably plenty of old (we are talking 30 year old) USSR nerve agents on the black market. What links any of this to Putin?

Dangerous games being played.


If media reports citing, to me, credible experts are to be believed, the agent was binary. This would mean that the two elements, separately harmless but requiring careful storage to prevent deterioration, would have to be mixed very carefully and under very controlled conditions shortly before application to the delivery medium. If this material did date back to the Soviet era and was not within a government controlled and presumably expensively maintained and guarded, then the miscreants who applied it would have needed both a similar storage then mixing facility, and people still skilled in such things from that era. I suppose that such miscreants and facilities might exist within a terrorist or other criminal organisation, but ascribing to a government facility and its employees all the time until shortly before application seems to me to be much more credible.

Willing, as ever, to be corrected by the better informed, but I'd hope that any speculation supporting other explanation would also be technically authoritative.
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#1601216
How do we know what nerve agents the Russians have developed? Presumably they do so in secret. And they've never been deployed anywhere except here. And it would be deuced hard for our man in Moscow to pinch a bit and slip into his trouser pocket before coming on leave. And there are unlikely to be any articles on the subject in New Scientist. So I say again - how do we know that the stuff found on the Salisbury door-knob came from Russia?
#1601217
matthew_w100 wrote:How do we know what nerve agents the Russians have developed? ..?


Just guessing but on basis of different but tangentially relevant military knowledge at the time: there were a lot of what then would have been called defections, or rather professionally qualified people taking advantage of new freedoms of movement, from the former USSR when it collapsed. Some got more publicity than others at the time and since; again unsurprising, as there were so many of them. For many, UK was destination of choice over US or other NATO or neutral countries. Presumably, any with insider knowledge of Soviet chemical weapons would have been invited to share such knowledge during the process of applying for permanent residence, and may have done so very readily.

What is also clear since Putin regained the Presidency from Medvedev is that he personally regards such leavers, let alone knowledge-sharers, as traitors, ..
#1601220
TBH I get - and respect- peoples’ doubt when their Glorious Leaders engage in sabre rattling.

100 years ago, young British and Commonwealth men were still throwing their bodies into barbed wire, artillery and highly efficient machine gun fire, after nearly 4 years of unimaginable carnage (but more of the same was on the menu)

A bit over 25 years ago, very few outside conspiracy theory circles doubted that Saddam’s troops were chucking premie babies out of incubators, and his million man army was about to march into SaudiLand.

15 years ago, 2 million Brits marched against Blair *before* GWII.

A couple of years back or whatever, the march to start bombing Assad got booted out of Parliament.

Who can forget Bliar’s Dodgy Dossier and the Downing Street Papers that basically confirmed that a small cabal of high officials were hell bent on the wrong war against the wrong people at the wrong time.

Is it such a surprise folks are backing off from this one?
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By Flintstone
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1601227
Which is exactly what Putin wants you to think. :wink:

What then of all the social media accounts, traced back to Russia, that immediately sprang to life spreading confusion, and ‘mis’-information? Very, very soon after the incident nd a bit too quick to be normal internet osmosis?
kanga liked this
#1601229
Flintstone wrote:Which is exactly what Putin wants you to think. :wink:

What then of all the social media accounts, traced back to Russia, that immediately sprang to life spreading confusion, and ‘mis’-information? Very, very soon after the incident nd a bit too quick to be normal internet osmosis?



Vladimear must be loving all this free publicity. It’s going to be a very effective deterrent to stop any further defections.
By johnm
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1601248
Politics and science use language that needs careful study. The scientists have made it clear that they believe it's a Russian military nerve agent but they can't prove that beyond ALL (not reasonable doubt) and it is conceivable (but unlikely) that someone else could have manufactured something almost identical.

The politicians position is then "It's Russia beyond reasonable doubt, because it's pretty certain it's their material and who else would be motivated to do for a Russian spy in exile and has done it before?"
#1601256
Flint - my stony friend, what drives public opinion and what drives action WRT external "security" are two very different things.
Sometimes they converge, but that is probably luck more than anything.

Modern security forces are, TBH, more hamstrung by domestic politics than they are by what the "other side" are doing. Even the ones who are meant to do external security have been bound by domestic law for many years.

Geneva Convention? A scrabble of British lawyers will fight over whether Afghans wearing a certain colour of headgear are considered "enemy combatants" or simple civvies. Is that walkie-talkie and AK47 for keeping in touch with your cousin up the hill and looking after the goats, or for that cousin who accidentally
buried a couple of hundred pounds of HE at the roadside last night, and a GSM or IR trigger.

FFS.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favour of the slash and burn hang em' high and put it on the front page tactics of the Austria-Hungarian Empire circa 1915/16.

Lets also not forget that "external contractors" (aka ex service gents) from "our side" were very active in ferkin over the Soviets in the 80s in Afghanistan. The Yanks were much more active. Each Govt, from Russian, to Chinese (who furnished arms), to Brit and Yanks will all deny this, but a number of books and in my personal sphere contacts I've had over the years counter the myth that Afghanistan wasn't a target of action from pretty much every major power on Earth.

Back to the OP. Nobody knows for sure how this poor gent and his daughter (and subsequent PC) got exposed to an extremely nasty binary + military
grade nerve agent.

It didn't happen by accident.

Was the wee Russian dwarf behind it?

Probably.

Is it possible that someone else did it? Yep, but it would- as Kanga said - be someone with the resources to construct the binary components, contain them with the required biohazard levels, then actively "weaponise" those components.

That's not some muppet who jerks off to ISIS videos.

I'm old enough to understand Realpolitik.
Putin is like a school bully who beat the sh.. out of kids outside the school boundaries then said "what? prove it".

He's a cnut. Having the West/NATO finally give him a kick in the cossacks is something he's actively been looking for, for a very long time.

The last time "we" expelled so many "staff without portfolio" was in the early 70s, and what I read before this all kicked off said it was a massive disruption to intel gathering by the soviets.

Fing is....nowadays the majority of intel stuff is done from a laptop and script kiddies.

Solution? Very simple. We set up a counter-intelligence community who are a mixture of overt and covert IT black hats, tasked with being as nasty as possible (but without pulling the trigger until ordered).

It's no secret in the IT world that our Russian friends are total bad starts WRT hacking, and social media spam factories etc. "Our" response has been, TBH, a disgrace.
User avatar
By Flintstone
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1601273
OCB wrote:Flint - my stony friend, what drives public opinion and what drives action WRT external "security" are two very different things.
Sometimes they converge, but that is probably luck more than anything.



Oh, I know. I was merely making the point that the Russians had their defence ready to go before the incident had even hit the press and while that’s hardly a smoking gun it’s just too slick to be coincidence.
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#1601276
Flinter - my experience with the external staff of Betty's fan club is that they are cautiously willing, but my personal experience (which is of course incredibly limited) says that, compared to the likes of our Israeli friends,is not much more use than a letter writing campaign by a bunch of girl guides.

TBH, that just encourages bad behaviour in delinquents.

If the wee hard man wants a new cold war - then why not give him one?
The Russian Embassy compound is a couple of KM from me. Lock it down, have every vehicle held up for a couple of hours to check papers, no staff or their family can go outside the compound etc without escorts.

The old Russian consul was very happy when he could fly his 172 unrestricted by politics. Until the late 90s he was banned from flying here.