by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The story the British government began telling in March 2018 on the road to the war, which the British and their allies are now losing in the Ukraine,  is that Russian assassins, on a mission approved by President Vladimir Putin,   tried to kill Sergei and Yulia Skripal with a poison weapon they left behind.

As story-telling goes, this one has been extraordinarily successful. Much more successful than the Anglo-American war against Russia.  Most British people, all United Kingdom media reporters,  and about one-quarter of the black cab drivers of London believe the story.

This large group of people are being persuaded by a retired Court of Appeal judge named Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley) not to notice that between the allegation of an unwitnessed attempt at murder by poison sprayed on a door handle on March 4, 2018, and the allegation of a death by poison sprayed from a perfume bottle on June 30, 2018, there is a gap of more than four months in time, and of almost fifteen kilometres in space.

The question for the judge is an obvious one: how did the murder weapon get from the one crime scene to the other without the murderer’s movement, presence or action; without leaving a single circumstantial clue;  and without causing collateral damage, let alone poisonous contamination of anyone over such a long interval.  

In testimony to answer this question this week in a London meeting hall made up like a court, Hughes listened to the chief investigator of the crimes at the Metropolitan Police repeatedly admit he didn’t  know how to explain the gap.

In ten accompanying evidence exhibits,  Hughes also accepted that the only way the sole witness called to explain the gap could do so was to coach him through ten separate police interviews, eight of them in just three weeks following the death of Dawn Sturgess, his girlfriend. The witness Charles Rowley, according to his police record, is a criminal with multiple heroin possession convictions, a suspect in dealing Class A drugs,   and a drug addict on methadone prescription. Para 31. Rowley was also on the press record as hustler for a million-pound payout.  

Rowley, the judge was told by the police, was classified by the MET as a Section 18 witness.  That is to say, according to the exhibit of the police “Witness Interview Strategy – Charlie Rowley”, dated July 12, 2018, he was a witness “whose quality of evidence is likely to be diminished by reason of fear or distress”.  

Hughes made a record of accepting as admissible Rowley’s changing and contradictory explanations of how he came by the poison weapon. The judge also accepted as admissible the MET’s acknowledgement that they don’t know with confidence how the poison weapon had gone from one place to the other. Their confidence was so low, the chief MET investigator told the judge, “we have not managed to secure sufficient  evidence yet to present to the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service], sir, that allows  them to charge with any offences linked to Dawn and  Charlie’s poisoning,”  — Page 6.

Hughes’s counsel replied: “Yes, thank you.  Moving on just a little bit.” .

The policeman, Commander Dominic Murphy, also said: “I don’t think we will ever actually know and the reality is there are of course several hypotheses for where the Novichok could have been and where Charlie could have found it”; “I think it’s worth acknowledging, sir, that there are of course many possibilities still for where the Novichok would have been and how Charlie found it”; “I don’t think we can discount the box being anywhere during those periods, no. We cannot evidence where the box was from 4 March right through to the point at which it was in Muggleton Road [Dawn Sturgess’s home]”; “I should say as the SIO [Senior Investigating Officer] for Operation Caterva I have seen no information or evidence to suggest that this is the case, but yes, of course it absolutely remains a possibility.”

“Thank you,” Hughes said.

Hughes tried telling the policeman how to say what he wasn’t sure he saw. “He [Rowley] is coming from the direction of the bins. What is he carrying, do you think? A [Murphy]. I would imagine items he has recovered during the process. LORD HUGHES: Well, don’t imagine, Mr Murphy, come on. What does it look like?”    The judge was so angry with the police officer, he stripped him of his commander rank.

In the Anglo-American jurisprudence of murder trials, when the judge coaches the witness in front of the jury, the defence lawyer rises and objects.  He then asks for the jury to be excused while he demands the judge retract, recuse himself, or dismiss the charges because the prosecution has failed to present a case to answer.  Hughes, however, is following the orders of the British Government, not English law.  The orders are to fabricate the appearance of the case which the prosecution cannot make, in order to “identify, so far as consistent with section 2 of the Inquiries Act 2005, where responsibility for the death   lies.”   

Russian weapon, Russian crime, Russian culprits, Russian responsibility – those are the Hughes orders.

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by Editor - Tuesday, November 26th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

On March 1, 2018, Alexander Skripal would have turned 44 years old. But he couldn’t celebrate his birthday with father Sergei Skripal and sister Yulia because Alexander was dead. He died on July 18, 2017; his body cremated in St Petersburg; his ashes buried at the London Road Cemetery at Salisbury (lead image), beside his mother, Lyudmila Skripal.

To honour Alexander’s birthday, his father and sister drove to the cemetery on Sunday morning, March 4, 2018. The distance from their home in Salisbury to the cemetery is less than five kilometres; depending on the route and the traffic, the drive can take less than ten minutes. Early on that cold wintry day, the journey would have taken less time.

The Skripals’ journey, their evidence of what happened, and the police testimony, which has followed in the hearings of the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry, reveal a tangle of inconsistencies, contradictions, fabrications, stonewalling, and lies. This tangle is proof enough that the British Government narrative of the Russian Novichok attack has collapsed. The truth can be found in the rubble.

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by Editor - Tuesday, November 26th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Almost over now is the British Government’s six-year operation to prove to the world that in 2018 Russian military officers killed Dawn Sturgess with a Novichok weapon, which they had discarded after using it first on Sergei and Yulia Skripal.  

Almost finished, too, is the Government’s campaign to prove that Sturgess’s lover and her family are not entitled to a multi-million pound compensation for the negligence of officials in stopping the Russians and their Novichok before they attacked the Skripals,  and then before Sturgess died.

The Sturgess Inquiry’s public witness testimony, which commenced on October 14, will conclude this week with an appearance by Jonathan Allen, Director General for defence and intelligence at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). Listed to testify on “current HMG [His Majesty’s Government] assessment of Russian State Responsibility”  Allen, who defended the Novichok allegations at the United Nations in 2018, will speak on Thursday, November 28; he will be the final witness to appear before lawyers make their summing-up statements. According to the Foreign Office, Allen’s job is “the delivery of UK policy for the FCDO response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and for Eastern Europe and Central Asia policy.”  

It is now too late for Allen to neutralize the expert witnesses – doctors at Salisbury District Hospital, scientists at the Defence Ministry’s chemical warfare establishment (Porton Down), eyewitnesses, police investigators. Their evidence exposes the alternative narrative that the Skripals were attacked by British government agents who manufactured the Novichok at Porton Down; fabricated traces of it along the trail of two Russian decoys; and then planted a Novichok-poisoned perfume bottle on Dawn Sturgess’s kitchen table – eleven days after police searches had failed to find it.

The hearing record also reveals repeated prompts and interruptions by Anthony Hughes, the retired judge directing the Sturgess Inquiry (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley), to prevent questioning of witnesses from turning into cross-examination of the Government’s allegations.

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by Editor - Sunday, November 24th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

President Vladimir Putin has announced that serial production of the new Oreshnik hypersonic, intermediate range, 36-warhead missile has commenced. He made this announcement at a special public meeting with Defense Ministry officials in the Kremlin on Friday, November 22.

“There are no means of countering such a missile; no means of intercepting it exist in the world today,” Putin said.  “We need to launch its serial production. Let us assume that the decision on the serial production of this system has been made. As a matter of fact, it has already been essentially organised.”

This means there are already, or will shortly be deployed, dozens of Oreshniki missiles for firing at targets in the Ukraine west of the Dnieper River and as far west as the Polish and Hungarian borders.

This also means that no American, no NATO staff group, no Anglo-American target intelligence unit in bunkers in Kiev or Lvov are safe any longer. Nor are Vladimir Zelensky and his advisors. To escape Israeli-precedent decapitation, they must all decamp to the Ukrainian war operations  mock-up already prepared on the Polish side of the border.

Ukrainian military intelligence head, Kirill Budanov, has claimed that the Oreshnik strike on the Yuzhmash (Pivdenmash) plant in Dniepropetrovsk  is “just a cipher…We know for sure that as of October they were supposed to make two research samples, maybe they made a little bit more, but believe me, this is a research sample, but not yet serial production, thank God.”  

“Wishful thinking,” a NATO military source comments. “He’ll get the chance to find out first- hand.”

Russian military sources add that, following disclosure of the Kremlin’s back-channel talks with Donald Trump and his advisors on terms for an end-of-war settlement, the Oreshnik is the signal that the “General Staff are  talking directly to Trump & Co.”  Putin was explicit in his first announcement of the Oreshnik firing: “We believe that the United States [President Trump] made a mistake by unilaterally destroying the INF Treaty in 2019 under a far-fetched pretext.”  

Dmitry Rogozin — formerly Russian NATO ambassador, then deputy prime minister in charge of the Russian military industrial complex,  now senator for Zaporozhye  – carefully identified the credit for the Oreshnik: “Today, everyone who fought for the creation of this missile system, who overcame what we may call scepticism,  should congratulate each other. And I join those congratulations. Good for you!…Thank you to the Supreme [Command, Верховному] for supporting the work! Thank you to the Academy for not backing away!”  

A Russian source, who does not believe Putin ordered the General Staff to suspend its electric war campaign between August and this month, believes Russian strategy now is “a thousand cuts. The Oreshnik is a particularly deep one but I don’t believe that the Kremlin and General Staff have decided to use it to hit Bankova [street address in Kiev of the presidential offices and living quarters ]. The decapitation threat is real enough though to impel Zelensky to exit, or maybe for the Ukrainian military to get rid of him on their own initiative.”

“Just as important,” the source says, “the Russian ground offensive in the east will remain slow, patient, maybe for two years more. The priority is on preventing Russian casualties, conserving Russian lives. This is essential once you realize that the [Putin] presidential succession also depends, not only on winning the war on Russian terms, but ensuring the protection of Russian lives.”

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by Editor - Saturday, November 23rd, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

This is the comic book version of what really happened, as revealed by the clumsiest judge in  England – Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley, lead image, right).

Even if all the evidence presented to Hughes and already endorsed by him is true – on the record of six and half years of British Government investigations and twenty-one days of hearings with concealed witness faces, censored documents, missing CCTV —  there remains no direct evidence that the Russians attacked the Skripals by poisoning their front-door handle when they were inside their home,  four hours before their collapse.

Instead, Hughes and his lawyers have directed the police and other witnesses to stretch their circumstantial evidence and dictated their inferences of Russian guilt. In New York, the legal textbook difference between direct and circumstantial evidence is this.  

To stretch the circumstantial evidence and inferences beyond the criminal standard of reasonable doubt, Hughes has prevented direct evidence from being presented, stopping the Skripals from testifying themselves. Their Home Office lawyer purportedly representing the Skripals in the hearings has said nothing at all; Hughes’s lawyers have manipulated witnesses with leading questions; alternative explanations for the circumstantial evidence have been blocked by Hughes from the hospital doctors and independent experts. The way in which this has been done is comic book jurisprudence. The judges of the former British empire aren’t laughing; this is how they say the means and opportunity of a capital crime must be prosecuted, then judged.  

The CCTV and other evidence presented at the Hughes hearings shows the Russians knew they had been marked by MI6 from the minute they booked their flights and landed at Gatwick Airport; and they then encouraged the video recording which took place, often mugging in front of the CCTV cameras for that purpose. There is no evidence of their coming close enough to the Skripal house, or to Sergei and Yulia Skripal (lead image, left) in person, in order to attack them.

Ergo, the evidence of the murder act is missing; the evidence of the murder weapon is missing; the evidence of the murder attempt at the bench is missing. Means, opportunity, motive are all missing from the British prosecution of the Russians for the crime.

Yulia Skripal has testified that the poison attack took place when she and her father were sprayed as they were eating lunch inside Zizzi’s Restaurant. They then walked outside, felt ill, sat down on a city bench, and collapsed.

Yulia Skripal’s evidence indicates the attackers were British.

The refusal of the British chemical warfare laboratory to name the weapon by its organophosphate name, and reveal its molecular composition and mass conceals the origin of the weapon. In police, forensic or courtroom practice, this is the equivalent of concealing ballistic evidence determining whether a fatal bullet was fired from the gun in the alleged shooter’s hand.  

The evidence, collected by the police and Porton Down agents, then analysed by Porton Down, then announced publicly by then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson days before he told Prime Minister May’s meeting of Cabinet,  is as likely to be of a British-made organophosphate nerve agent subsequently called Novichok as of a Russian-made nerve agent.

What motive: why would the British attack the Skripals?

Their reason was that they believed Sergei Skripal was planning to return home to Russia, and that the GRU was planning an exfiltration operation on March 4, 2018. The Russians knew that MI6 would be suspicious, so they prepared decoys. These are the two men, Alexander Petrov (Alexander Mishkin) and Ruslan Boshirov (Anatoly Chepiga),  now accused of the Novichok attack.

The British planned to kill the Skripals but camouflage the operation, as they have done. Motive was pressing for the British if Sergei Skripal had returned to Russia, revealing himself in Moscow to be one of the first successful triple agents in modern espionage history.

The Russian exfiltration failed;  the British failed to execute the Skripals on the spot; for a few minutes from her hospital bed on March 8, Yulia Skripal revealed what had happened before she was put into an artificial coma, then silenced with a tracheostomy on March 21, and kept incommunicado ever since.

The British camouflage for their operation – Operation KISS, “Kill Instantly the Skripals” — relied on the door-handle as “ground zero” – the original source of the Novichok – and on Porton Down to replace the inconclusive or negative tests conducted by doctors treating the Skripals at Salisbury District Hospital.

A corpse had to be found, dead enough not to be able to testify otherwise as Yulia Skripal had done.

That turned out to be Dawn Sturgess, who died at her home on June 30, 2018, of cardiac arrest and brain hypoxia after consuming a combination of sleeping and anti-anxiety medications, cocaine, and fentanyl. The Novichok weapon, fabricated in a perfume atomiser by MI6 and Porton Down,  was then placed on Sturgess’s kitchen table for the police to discover eleven days after her drug binge and collapse; and after medics and police had failed to find it through multiple and repeated searches.

For the evidence and the law, and to understand who laughs last in this comic book of  British public inquiry, follow frame by frame, tweet by tweet, here.   

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by Editor - Friday, November 22nd, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

In politics — the Kremlin is no exception — politicians don’t mean what they say.  In gardening, the plants always mean what they say. Gardeners, obliged to record what that is, are more likely than politicians to tell the truth.

In the records of Russian politicians since the Bolshevik Revolution, only one leading figure stands out as having the eye, ear, and nose for what plants have to tell. Not the present nor the founding one. The only gardener among them was, and remains, Joseph Stalin.

Nothing has been found that he wrote himself on his gardening except perhaps for marginal comments in books he read.  There is no mention of books on gardens or gardening in the classification system Stalin’s personal library adopted from 1925. He kept no garden diary. Without a diary recording the cycle of time and seasons, the planting map, colour scheme, productivity of bloom and fruit, infestation,  life and death, he must have committed his observations – “he possessed unbelievably acute powers of observation” (US Ambassador George Kennan) – to memory,  as peasants do.  

Unlike the tsars who employed English, Scots, and French architects and plantsmen to create gardens in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the royal fashions of Europe, defying the Russian winter to display their power and affluence without shovelling for themselves, Stalin dug his gardens himself in the warm weather of his dacha at Gagra, on the Black Sea. There he was photographed with his spade tending parallel, raised beds of lemon trees (lead image, top).  There is no sign of him wielding trowel and fork in the garden at Kuntsevo, his dacha near Moscow, where the photographs show him strolling in a semi-wild young forest or seated on a terrace in front of a hedge of viburnum. No record of Stalin digging at Kuntsevo has been found.

There is just one reminiscence of Stalin speaking to a visitor about his gardening. “Stalin is very fond of fruit trees. We came to a lemon bush. Joseph Vissarionovich carefully adjusted the bamboo stick to make it easier for the branches to hold large yellow fruits. ‘But many people thought that lemons would not grow here!’ [He said]  Stalin planted the first bushes himself, took care of them himself. And now he has convinced many gardeners by his example. He talks about it in an enthusiastic voice and often makes fun of would-be gardeners. We came to a large tree. I don’t know it at all. ‘What is the name of this tree?’ I asked Stalin. ‘Oh, this is a wonderful plant! It’s called eucalyptus,’ Joseph Vissarionovich said, plucking leaves from the tree. He rubs the leaves on his hand and gives everyone a sniff. ‘Do you feel how strong the smell is? This is the smell that the malaria mosquito does not tolerate.’ Joseph Vissarionovich tells how, with the help of eucalyptus, the Americans got rid of the mosquito during the construction of the Panama Canal, how the same eucalyptus helped with the work in swampy Australia. I felt very embarrassed that I did not know this wonderful tree.”   

Stalin read a great deal of philosophy, Roman and Russian history, art, and agronomy, and so he is bound to have reflected on the way in which the ideas of the classics he read took physical form in the gardens of the time. Especially so on the ancient idea of the paradise garden. It is this transference between thinking and digging, between the idea of paradise and the cultivation of it, which a new book, just published in London, explores in a radical way.

Olivia Laing, author of The Garden Against Time, In Search of a Common Paradise, knows nothing whatever about Russia or its gardens or its politics – except for propaganda on the Ukraine war she has absorbed unquestioningly and briefly repeats from the London newspapers. That’s a personal fault; it’s not a dissuasion from the book of reflections she has written out from her garden diary to an end which Russians understand to aim at, not less than the English.

In this wartime it’s necessary to keep reflecting on this end, on the aesthetic and philosophical purpose of the paradise garden. Laing begins her book and her garden with John Milton’s lament for gardening in wartime – in his case, the English Civil War of 1642-46 and the counter-revolution of 1660. “More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang’d”, Milton observed at the beginning of Book 7 of his Paradise Lost, “to hoarce or mute, though fall’n on evil dayes/ On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues;/in darkness and with dangers compast round,/And solitude.”  

At the same time, Laing records for herself and Stalin certainly knew, “what I loved, aside from the work of making [the paradise garden], was the self-forgetfulness of the labour, the immersion in a kind of trance of attention that was as unlike daily thinking as dream logic is to waking.”

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by Editor - Sunday, November 17th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

On Sunday afternoon the Russian Defense Ministry confirmed that a massive strike of air and sea-launched missiles and drones have struck and destroyed parts of the Ukrainian electricity grid in the western regions of the country, as well as in Odessa and Nikolaev in the southeast.  

The Mukachevo interconnector station in southwestern Ukraine has also been hit, damaging the import of electricity from Slovakia and Moldova.  

The electric war in the west by the Russian General Staff has been put on pause by President Vladimir Putin since the last major raid on August 26, while back-channel negotiators for the Kremlin exchanged armistice terms with the Biden Administration and with Donald Trump.   

The resumption of Russian missile strikes on west Ukrainian electricity infrastructure follows the disclosure in Washington on Sunday that the US has agreed to allow American and Ukrainian crews to fire long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) on Russian territory.  

Russian military sources comment that threats to escalate the war unless Putin agrees to extend the pause and to limit the westward offensive of Russian forces along the Donbass front have come from both Biden officials, and from Trump himself when he spoke with Putin by telephone last week.  

“The electric war strikes are coordinated with the ground offensives,” a military source comments. “We’re seeing the General Staff calling the bluff of both Biden and Trump with the counter threat to wind up the war before the inauguration [January 20]. That the Ukrainians in the western regions are bracing for power blackouts tell us, again, that [Chief of the General Staff Valery] Gerasimov’s staff are monitoring the Ukrainian electrical repair and replacement efforts, the weather, and the political situation in Washington.  The strikes have been timed accordingly.”

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by Editor - Sunday, November 17th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Yulia Skripal communicated from her bedside at Salisbury District Hospital on March 8, 2018, four days after she and her father Sergei Skripal collapsed from a poison attack, that the attacker used a spray; and that the attack took place when she and her father were eating at a restaurant just minutes before their collapse on a bench outside.

The implication of the Skripal evidence, revealed for the first time on Thursday, is that the attack on the Skripals was not perpetrated by Russian military agents who were photographed elsewhere in Salisbury town at the time; that the attacker or attackers were British agents; and that if their weapon was a nerve agent called Novichok, it came, not from Moscow, but from the UK Ministry of Defence chemical warfare laboratory at Porton Down.

Porton Down’s subsequent evidence of Novichok contamination in blood samples, clothing, car, and home of the Skripals may therefore be interpreted as British in source, not Russian.  

This evidence was revealed by a police witness testifying at the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry in London on November 14. The police officer, retired Detective Inspector Keith Asman was in 2018, and he remains today  the chief of forensics for the Counter Terrorism Policing (CTPSE) group which combines the Metropolitan and regional police forces with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5).

According to Asman’s new disclosure, Yulia Skripal had woken from a coma and confirmed to the doctor at her bedside that she remembered the circumstances of the attack on March 4. What she remembered, she signalled,  was not (repeat not) the official British Government narrative that Russian agents had tried to kill them by poisoning the front door-handle of the family home.

The new evidence was immediately dismissed by the Sturgess Inquiry lawyer assisting Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley), the judge directing the Inquiry. “We see there,” the lawyer put to Asman as a leading question, “the suggestion, which we now know not to be right, of course”.   — page 72.

Hughes then interrupted to tell the witness to disregard what Skripal had communicated. “If the record that you were given there is right, someone suggested to her ‘Had you been sprayed’.  She didn’t come up with it herself.”    — page 73. Hughes continued to direct the forensics chief to disregard the hearsay of Skripal. “Anyway the suggestion that she had been sprayed in the restaurant didn’t fit with your investigations?  A. [Asman] No, sir. LORD HUGHES:  Thank you.”

So far in in the Inquiry which began public sessions on October 14, this is the first direct sign of suppression of evidence by Hughes.

Hearsay, he indicates,  should be disregarded if it comes from the target of attack, Yulia Skripal. However, hearsay from British Government officials, policemen, and chemical warfare agents at Porton Down must be accepted instead. Hughes has also banned Yulia and Sergei Skripal from testifying at the Inquiry.  

The lawyer appointed and paid by the Government to represent the Skripals in the inquiry hearings said nothing to acknowledge the new disclosure nor to challenge Hughes’s efforts to suppress it.

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by Editor - Saturday, November 16th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Anthony Hughes, the retired judge (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley) directing the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry in London, opened the questioning of a senior British Government chemical warfare agent on Wednesday by telling him “you’re not bound by your statement, but by all means use it to refresh your recollection”  — page 5.

This is a licence to lie. The head of chemical and biological analysis at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down was given the cipher MK26 to conceal his name — his face screened from view in the videotape  of the hearing — to do just that.

Hughes also arranged for his assisting counsel, Andrew O’Connor KC, to give the government official this version of the witness oath. “May I ask you,” O’Connor said, “whether you have had an opportunity to read through this statement before giving evidence today? A. Yes, I have. Q. Are its contents true to the best of your knowledge and belief? A. Yes, they are.  Q. Thank you.”  

As Hughes and O’Connor know very well, the official oath in British courtroom practice is that witness swears his testimony “shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”   In this case, the judge and his lawyer gave the witness a licence not to tell the whole truth.

Just in case these licences to lie and to evade the truth were spotted by the public,  O’Connor told MK26 that he and Hughes accepted his “statement does not contain everything that you can say about these matters because there are  some further issues, further material that is covered by the restriction [secrecy] orders.  A. Yes, that’s correct.  Q. As a result, it’s right, is it not, that you  will be coming back when the Inquiry sits in its closed  sessions to give further evidence and on that occasion  you will be able to provide the Chair with the  information which you cannot provide today?  A. Yes.”   — page 6.

According to the exhibits MK26 had signed for the Inquiry, of the two pages of witness statement he had signed to the police on July 16, 2018, everything has been blacked out except one short paragraph giving the official accreditation of the workshops MK26 headed at the DSTL Porton Down.  A second witness statement MK26 signed for the Coroners Court on August 20, 2019, comprises five pages, but they have all been censored. The only lines which remain say: “I have complied with, and will continue to comply with, my duty to the court to provide independent assistance by way of objective unbiased opinion in relation to matters within my expertise.”    At the Bar this is recognized as the Queen Gertrude defence for lying; it comes from “the lady doth protest too much, methinks”, the well-known line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A Defence Ministry employee cannot be independent, or objective, or unbiased in relation to his official work orders.  

The political significance of the Porton Down lying has been international. It was the foundation of the claim the British Government made to its NATO allies five weeks after  Sergei and Yulia Skripal’s collapse that the UK was  the target of a Novichok attack by  Russia.

According to a letter sent to the NATO headquarters by Sir Mark Sedwill, then the Prime Minister’s national security advisor and supervisor of intelligence operations, “I would like to share with you and Allies further information regarding our assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian state was responsible for the Salisbury attack. Only Russia has the technical means, operational experience and the motive. The OPCW’s. [Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons] analysis matches the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory’s [DSTL Porton Down] own, confirming once again the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical of high purity that was used in Salisbury. OPCW have always been clear that it was their role to identify what substance was used, not who was responsible… of course, the DSTL analysis does not identify the country or laboratory of origin of the agent used in this attack…We therefore continue to judge that only Russia has the technical means, operational experience and motive for the attack on the Skripals and that it is highly likely that the Russian state was responsible. There is no plausible alternative explanation.”  

Sedwill was lying. Porton Down was lying. OPCW repeated the lies it was given by the British. There was, there still is,  a plausible alternative explanation.

In his appearance at Hughes’s hearing this week, MK26 tried to conceal this with what an independent British organic chemist with comparable expertise to MK26 describes as “camouflage science – faulty assumptions, missing chemical names, speculative findings, a day of witchcraft.”

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by Editor - Thursday, November 14th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

This week’s announcements of emergency electricity rationing and scheduled power supply cuts in the farwestern Ukrainian regions of Volyn, Ivano-Frankivsk and Transcarpathia indicate that pinpoint drone targeting by the Russian General Staff  is a new stage in the electric war since President Vladimir Putin put on pause long-range missile attacks on western Ukrainian power generation plants since August 26.

On Tuesday, the regional Ukrainian media reported “restrictions will apply to businesses in the Ivano-Frankivsk and Volyn oblasts starting on 13 November, in five phases, and will be scheduled from 07:00 to 20:00. The restrictions are being implemented due to damage to critical infrastructure by Russian forces and decreasing temperatures.”    The national utility Ukrenergo announced that from November 13 “GOPs [power limit schedules] are being introduced due to a shortage in the energy system in the Carpathian region”.  

The deficit in the current demand-supply balance for electricity has also been compounded by the decline reported in the Ukrainian press of imports of power from cross-border sources in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania,  and Moldova.  The reported cutback this week defies the European Union (EU) agreement at the end of October for “an increase of the export capacity limit to Ukraine and Moldova to 2,100 megawatts (MW) during this winter. It represents an increase of 400 MW from the previous value [1,700 MW]…The 2,100 MW export capacity limit will apply from 1 December 2024.”  

“This is a temporary situation,” Ukraine’s energy minister Herman Halushchenko announced on Wednesday. “ ‘Unfortunately, restored generation facilities can occasionally fail. This has happened, but all these issues will be resolved, and the situation will stabilize,’ he stated. The minister also pointed to a significant reduction in electricity imports to Ukraine, which are currently down to about 100 MW.”  

A military source comments: “The damage from the August attacks has not been repaired – just patched up. There have been strikes on transformer stations since. They’ve been smaller in scale but indicative of the [Russian] General Staff’s knowledge of the [Ukrainian] distribution grid vulnerabilities. The General Staff’s moves have complicated Ukrainian efforts to keep the power on. The Ukrainians are hiding how bad the situation is, including in terms of getting spares. The temperature is dipping below freezing at night, the daylight hours are shorter, the electrical lighting and heating loads are going up. The jury-rigged grid is unable to handle it without curtailments.”

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by Editor - Wednesday, November 13th, 2024
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