by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The Novichok show trial ended its public hearings last week in London with the revelation that it will not name the chemical constituents of the poison used in the attempted killing of Sergei and Yulia Skripal on March 4, 2018, and in the cause of death of Dawn Sturgess on June 30, 2018.

By doing this, by keeping the chemical formula combination of the poison a state secret, independent British toxicologists say there is no evidence that a Russian-made Novichok was used; and that, instead,  a British or US-made Novichok was readily available in 2018,  and this was as likely to have been the killer weapon.  

Revealed earlier in the hearings by a doctor at Yulia Skripal’s bedside four days after the attack,  Skripal believed she and her father had been hit by a poison spray as they ate lunch at a restaurant just before they collapsed outside.  Skripal’s evidence pointed to a British operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal before he escaped back to Moscow, and then cover up by planting fabricated Russian clues at the crime scenes, and in the blood test reports of the victims.

Weapon, crime scene, victim pathology, killer identification, motive – all faked.

The toxicology experts point out that in 2018 scientists working on this type of organophosphate poison had revealed synthesis, production, testing and stocking of A232 and A234 Novichok in the US Army’s chemical warfare centre, known by its location as the Edgewood Arsenal;  and at its British counterpart and partner, the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), known as Porton Down. The Iranian military establishment had also done the same by 2016.   After the Skripal case in 2018, military chemists in South Korea   and the Czech Republic  revealed how they had produced and tested their own formulas for Novichok.

By openly publishing their Novichok chemistry, the Americans, Iranians, South Koreans, and Czechs have proved that making, detecting and naming Novichok is a transparent process, not difficult to verify forensically in a criminal investigation or court.  This, British scientists now say, means that the refusal of government officials and the Sturgess Inquiry judge, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley, lead image, right), to name the Novichok alleged to have been the Russian murder weapon, is evidence of a scheme of British fabrication and coverup.

Mark Allen (lead image, left) of the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) was the last witness to testify before Hughes at the Inquiry’s public hearings. As head of defence and intelligence, he was also the official in charge of coordinating the intelligence and military units involved in the attack on the Skripals; and then in the police and media coverup employed to pin the crime on the Russian military intelligence agency GRU, and on President Vladimir Putin.

Allen’s testimony on November 28 identified as his direct superior Sir Mark Sedwill,  the national security advisor reporting to then-Prime Minister Theresa May and then-Foreign Minister Boris Johnson.

“As SRO [Senior Responsible Owner] for Russia,” Allen said, “when we’re dealing with Russia strategy, the Government strategy towards Russia, I bring together all government departments, including representatives of the agencies as well, to ensure that we’re all essentially using all of our levers, all of our information, all of our understanding is pointing in the same direction and we’re being coherent.  Then where there are situations where something unexpected arises, what you might call a crisis of some sort, then I will also chair that sort of grouping to work out what our collective response should be.”

“I act, not as the Foreign Office’s DG [director-general], but as the government’s senior official.  Page 17 Asked to substantiate public statements at the time by May, Johnson and Sedwill that only Russia could have made and used the Novichok weapon, Allen was unable.

“… it is safe to say that any modern chemical  laboratory is capable of synthesising Novichok.  In contrast to what you have said about it being a state — really only something that can be done at the state level.  Is there anything that you can add to this debate, Mr Allen?  A. I don’t think that is a view that is shared in the scientific community, or in the OPCW.”   Page 41.

This was a lie; Hughes let it go unchallenged.  

“LORD HUGHES:  As far as you know, is it something which has been asserted either by Mr Mirzayanov  or by the other publications of American, Czech, Italian, et cetera, researchers?

“A [Allen]: I haven’t read those in detail, sir, so I couldn’t say.

“LORD HUGHES:  All right, thank you.”   Page 41.

“What’s in a name like Novichok? Why the coverup?” responds an independent British chemist and expert on organophosphates. “If the full molecular readout was exposed publicly from the blood sampling of the Skripals and Sturgess — also later of [Alexei] Navalny   — then it would be obvious that some constituents are missing. And because they are missing from the name or the reported chemical formula, then identification of Novichok cannot be made. All we are left with is an assumption covered up and concealed in secret. The scientific name for that is a lie.”

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by Editor - Sunday, December 1st, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The damage assessments of yesterday’s November 28 electric war strikes against targets across the Ukraine spell the countrywide collapse of electricity supply before January 20, when the new Trump Administration will take office.

By then, the Russian General Staff will have deprived Keith Kellogg, the retired US Army general newly appointed to serve as Trump’s negotiator for end-of-war terms, of the options he has publicly declared for himself, and also for Trump, in their war to make America great again in Europe.

“The Mayor of Kiev told us this is genocide,” Kellogg said in interview with Fox News.    “Now we are right on the cusp…This is going to be a fight to the end… Again, as I said, I think it’s a fight to the finish…Why this is important geo-strategically is that if we [US] can —  if the Ukrainians can defeat Russia in the field, and evict them from the Donbass or the Crimea, Putin falls. It changes Europe for a generation to come…So one of these two sides is going to win. I don’t think there’s going to be anything to negotiate.”

Kellogg said this in February 2023, after he had returned from a sponsored trip to Kiev and to the eastern region of the country. Subsequently, he was paid to write an end-of-war strategy paper for Trump to use during the last months of the election campaign this year.  This focused on attacking the Biden Administration for weakening the US and the NATO allies on the battlefield, and also in Europe. Trump’s “geo-strategic” priority remained, Kellogg wrote, to prevent “Ukraine fatigue among the Europeans, threatening to leave the United States, once again, as the primary defence contributor to Europe and further straining America’s ability to maintain its own critical defence stockpiles.”

Negotiating to prevent the US from losing its military dominance in Europe, and to conserve the forces and weapon supplies “needed in other conflicts, especially if China invades Taiwan” are Kellogg’s running orders from Trump.  

Russian sources say that reviving the Reagan Administration’s “Star Wars” weapons systems to combat Russia’s Kinzhal and Oreshnik missile advantage is the unstated “geo-strategic” priority, not only of Kellogg but of others in the Trump administration.  They believe Elon Musk will lobby the president to make himself “chief US rocketeer to get a trillion-dollar contract to build missiles to counter us. But if they want a new arms race, they are already trailing. They will lose in space what they’ve already lost on the ground.”

According to a US veteran of the Afghanistan War, the career military experience Kellogg brings to his new job is “losing, not winning on the battlefield. He’s a typical empire enforcer. The last time Kellogg fought a competent military force, it was the Vietnamese, and Kellogg lost. For Trump to pick a man whose military victories are the invasion of Panama, the defeat of Iraq in  Gulf War-1,  and running a nuclear war bunker with Paul Wolfowitz during 9/11, tells you that it’s lights-out in the minds of both the soldier and his commander.”

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by Editor - Friday, November 29th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

In remarks to Russian journalists on Thursday evening, President Vladimir Putin confirmed that missile and drone strikes against the Ukraine’s military infrastructure and the electricity grid  carried out on Thursday,  and also earlier in the week, are the retaliation the Defense Ministry foreshadowed  for the November 23-25 ATACMS strikes on Kursk.

Detailed target and damage reports by Russian military bloggers published between noon and 13:00 Moscow time, indicate that strikes by Kalibr and Kh-101 missiles, drones, and other weapons hit targets across the country’s electricity system, including the western regions of Rivne, Khmelnitsky, Volyn, and Vynnitsa. Power blackouts in the Ukraine were reported to be widespread from the line of combat in the east to the Polish border in the west, with up to eleven hours of power outage in Kiev where the temperature has dropped below freezing.   

President Putin followed in remarks to Russian reporters at the conclusion of his two-day meetings in Astana, Kazakhstan, in a session posted by the Kremlin at 17:15. Asked several questions about the use of the Oreshnik missile in Russian retaliation for the ATACMS strikes on Kursk on November 23 and 25, Putin quipped that it is being saved for a rainy day.

“It would be futile to target a minor objective with a hypersonic missile; that’s like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. However, we will utilise our entire arsenal against significant targets. As I have previously mentioned, we do not rule out the combat employment of Oreshnik on military-industrial facilities or command centres, including those in Kiev.”  

The earlier ATACMS attacks, Putin said, “received a response today. Our Armed Forces have been executing retaliatory strikes over the past couple of days. Today, there was a comprehensive operation: 90 missiles were deployed alongside 100 unmanned strike vehicles. Seventeen targets within Ukraine were struck, encompassing military, military-industrial, and auxiliary facilities which support the armed forces and industrial defence enterprises. I wish to reiterate once more: we will certainly respond to such acts of aggression against the Russian Federation. The timing, methods, and weapons employed will be determined by the General Staff of the Ministry of Defense, as each target necessitates a specific approach and appropriate weaponry.”

Asked again about Oreshnik, “do you think these strikes on the [Kiev decision-making] centres are also possible with Oreshnik because nothing else seems to be able to get it?” Putin replied: “You know, in Soviet times there was that joke about weather forecasts. ‘The forecast is: Everything is possible today during the day.’ ”  

The president was followed on Thursday evening, Moscow time, by a detailed Defense Ministry bulletin announcing  “in response to the strikes of the Kiev regime in the depths of the territory of Russia, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation during this week carried out strikes on the locations of the systems of long-range western weapons of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”  Details of the targets followed, including US and French military personnel reported killed while directing Ukrainian missile operations in bunkers at Kharkov and Odessa.

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by Editor - Thursday, November 28th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

On Tuesday afternoon, November 26, the Russian Defense Ministry issued an unusual bulletin revealing that since the Oreshnik strike on November 21, the US had launched two ATACMS  attacks across the Ukrainian border on Russian military targets in the Kursk region. The first of these on an S-400 air defence unit on November 23 had not been disclosed before. Both the November 23 and November 25 ATACMS strikes, totalling 13 missiles in all, had been partially intercepted. Russian casualties were suffered, including several fatalities.

The Defense Ministry also telegraphed its punch. “Retaliatory actions are being prepared,” the bulletin concluded.

Earlier that same morning, November 26, the airspace around the Oreshnik launch site at Kapustin Yar — east of Volgograd in the north of Astrakhan region — was identified for closure to civilian flights by an international notice to airmen (NOTAM). The notice said the no-flight zone would start at 04:00 on Thursday, November 27, and continue until 20:00 on Saturday, November 30.  Kapustin Yar was the launch pad for the first Oreshnik strike on the Yuzhmash plant at Dniepropetrovsk on November 21.   

The flight distance for that Russian missile from launch to target was 800 kilometers.  If a second Oreshnik strike is being prepared at Kapustin Yar, the range to US and Ukrainian military bunkers at Kiev is within 1,100 kms; to the comparable military targets in Lvov, 1,600 kms; to the US-Ukrainian base at Rzeszów, on the Polish side of the border, 1,750 kms.  The Oreshnik can strike targets at up to 5,000 kms, making it an “intermediate range”, not an “intercontinental range” missile.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 27, President Vladimir Putin arrived in Astana, Kazakhastan, for two days of talks.  He is due to return from Kazakhstan on the evening of Thursday, November 28.

Once the president is in Moscow, he will be in position to order, direct, and follow a retaliation strike by the General Staff against US and Ukrainian targets. If the strike flies at Oreshnik speed of Mach 10 to Mach 12, the operation will run from 5 to 9 minutes. If a 30-minute advance warning is sent to the US, and if a civilian evacuation warning is also issued, as Putin has foreshadowed,  then one hour on Friday or Saturday will be what Putin has called the “danger zone”.

“In case of an escalation of aggressive actions,” Putin has said, “we will respond decisively and in mirror-like manner…It goes without saying that when choosing, if necessary and as a retaliatory measure, targets to be hit by systems such as Oreshnik on Ukrainian territory, we will in advance suggest that civilians and citizens of friendly countries residing in those areas leave danger zones. We will do so for humanitarian reasons, openly and publicly, without fear of counter-moves coming from the enemy, who will also be receiving this information.”  

The Defense Ministry has now confirmed the escalation by the US on November 23 and 25.  Putin will decide his retaliation before Saturday evening.  

Led by Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio, listen to the discussion of what is about to happen, and of the Trump officials to whom the Kremlin and the General Staff are sending their message.

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by Editor - Wednesday, November 27th, 2024
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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.”

(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, November 17th, 2024
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