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| Two people wait to get into the Russian Embassy as
a man works to untangle the national flag flown from the Russian
Embassy, after it became entangled on its staff at the embassy in
London, Wednesday, March 14, 2018. Britain announced Wednesday it will
expel 23 Russian diplomats, the biggest such expulsion since the Cold
War, and break off high-level contacts with the Kremlin over the
nerve-agent attack on a former spy and his daughter in an English
town. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant) |
When attacked, counter-attack. Take all the evidence of malicious malfeasance targeting your military and spy agency, and your nation and simply turn it upside-down and inside-out and lay it on the conscience of those slandering your lily-white reputation as a peaceful, non-aggressive state simply dreadfully misunderstood and slandered by the West, but soldiering manfully on regardless. The Russian Federation has never, ever threatened its neighbours, interfered in Georgia, Ukraine or Estonia, much less bombed hospitals in Syria; slander, all of it.
"No one can come to [the Kremlin] parliament and say, 'I give Russia 24 hours' [to respond to Britain's ultimatum on the Skripal nerve gas assassination attempt]."
"One should not threaten a nuclear power. Who does Britain think it is, issuing ultimatums to a nuclear power?"
Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman, Russian Foreign Ministry
The attempted assassination of the former Russian spy who aligned himself with MI6 has nothing, apparently, to do with Vladimir Putin. Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia are beneath President Putin's notice. Traitors to Russia, they are of no interest whatever to him and British investigators analyzing the nerve agent used to try to kill them, identifying it as a Russian military-produced nerve agent is simply incidental, and Great Britain's problem, not Russia's.
Britain has quite a few such problems, it would seem, and another one just cropped up.
A former colleague of the dead oligarch Boris Berezovsky, 68-year-old Nikolai Glushkov, formerly head of Aeroflot, who recently stated his belief that he was placed on a Kremlin hit-list has been proven quite correct for he is now dead, found in
"unexplained" circumstances, according to police. Vladimir Putin has no love for those who decry his style of statecraft; they are as much his 'rivals' as Syrian Sunnis are 'terrorists' in Bashar al Assad's playbook of vengeance.
"Strangulation marks" distinguish the manner of Mr. Glushkov's death yesterday.
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| Nikolai Glushkov
Photograph: Tass/PA Images |
Special counterterrorism detectives are now on the job. Following hard on Britain's decision to institute a review of up to no fewer than fourteen deaths of expatriate Russians living in Britain who have mysteriously expired. What exactly is it about Britain that is so deadly to Russian lives? Their sudden, inexplicable and often gruesome death throes represent a puzzle waiting to be solved. One ignored heretofore in the interests of appreciation of investment in London real estate but timely given recent events and tardy realizations.
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| A policeman stands guard outside the house of Nikolai Glushkov. Photograph: Will Edwards/AFP/Getty Images |
Police in Salisbury now say that 38 people have been treated in the wake of the nerve gas attempt at murder of the two Russians, father and daughter, basking in the belief they were free from danger living in quiet, friendly Salisbury. Now, added to the forensic tents that have appeared here and there in Salisbury, another two have popped up outside the house where the unfortunate Mr. Glushkov has lived for the past three years.
"It looks suspicious in the wake of the poisoning of Mr. Skripal. He [Glushkov] was a public figure in Russia and he was one of the closest partners of Mr. Berezovsky", explained Alex Goldfarb a Russian dissident and friend of the deceased. Mr. Glushkov had himself claimed that the hanged Mr. Berezovsky had been murdered on orders put out by Putin.
"There were traces of him being strangled around the neck."
More, there appears always to be more mysterious deaths and this, another friend of both Glushkov and Berezovsky, Badri Patarkatsishvili, a 52-year-old Georgian who died in Surrey at his home, of an apparent heart attack in 2008. The man held to be the murderer of polonium-poisoned Alexander Litvinenko, Andrey Lugovoi, was once Patarkatsishvili's chauffeur and acted as security adviser to Glushkov. Yes indeed, the plot sickens as it thickens.
Andrey Lugovoi is now a member of Russian parliament, and a Putin supporter.
Notice too, that many of these people slated for unexpected deaths are Russian Jews. Evidently their unease with Vladimir Putin's governing style sat ill with Mr. Putin. Who ventured the opinion in a recent interview that perhaps it could have been Jews with Russian citizenship that have been responsible for untoward events such as suspicious deaths. Not so long ago in Russia such accusations would have led to vicious pogroms. Now they merely cap assassinations.
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