What will be written on the US Government’s piece of paper since the Russian Government already knows – its intelligence services know, the Solar Winds hackers know – what was not written on the papers which Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman was reading at the Geneva talks with Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov on Monday?
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, announced on Thursday evening the US should now produce on paper its proposals for reducing the risk of war. Or else, Lavrov also told Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, the US will have war with Russia. Enough “arrogance of the highest degree”, and “foaming at the mouth”, Lavrov told Blinken. That “the Secretary of State of a serious state [солидного государства] declares such things” is – Lavrov left the expletive unsaid.
“We hope that the promises made now in Geneva and Brussels will be fulfilled. They concerned the fact that the United States and NATO would put their proposals ‘on paper’. We have clearly and repeatedly explained to them that we need to have an article-by-article reaction to our documents. If some position is not suitable, let them explain why and write ‘on paper’. If it is suitable with amendments, then they should also be done in writing. If they want to exclude or add something – a similar request. We gave our thoughts in writing a month ago. There was plenty of time in Washington and Brussels. Both of them promised that they would put their reaction ‘on paper’.”
Lavrov was waving the American piece of paper to remind that the piece of paper which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain displayed on September 30, 1938 (lead image), on his return from talks with German Chancellor Adolph Hitler, contained the line expressing “the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again”. That turned out to be false – Hitler didn’t mean it; Chamberlain wasn’t sure but wanted his electorate to believe it, plus time to prepare.
Lavrov is announcing that Russia today knows the US intention is to go to war; and that Russia is prepared and is already on war footing on all fronts.
That Sherman told Ryabkov on Monday “the United States and Russia agree that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought” is just as false, Lavrov has now declared — unless what follows is Sherman’s paper. On that paper there must be “legal guarantees of non-expansion of NATO to the East, legal guarantees of non-deployment of shock [nuclear] weapons in our neighbouring territories that pose a threat to Russia’s security, and in principle, the return of the configuration of the European security architecture to 1997, when the Russia-NATO Founding Act was signed. On its basis, the Russia-NATO Council was subsequently created. These are three key requirements. The rest of the proposals depend on how the conversation goes on these three initiatives.”
Lavrov’s declaration also dismissed as empty the attempts to intervene in the Russia-US negotiations by Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general now approaching the end of his term; and Josep Borrell, the Europe Union foreign minister from Spain. Stoltenberg, Lavrov said, was “shaking the air”. Borell had been “emotional and not very polite”.
Lavrov’s spokesman, Maria Zakharova, followed at her briefing on Thursday by remarking: “It seems that there are two J. Borrells: one is the one who speaks, and the second is the one who writes. Or one J.Borrell, who speaks, but other people write for him. Both in style, and in language, and in the expressions used, these texts do not belong to one person. It’s obvious.”
The only interlocutor left in Europe Lavrov identified as serious is France. Germany went unmentioned; the British were not to be believed, Lavrov commented; the US Senate is suffering from a “nervous breakdown… a psychological point that’s difficult to explain.”
When it comes to understanding the Geneva round of talks between the Russian and US foreign ministries on Monday, it is helpful to read; and if that is unavailing, to ask official sources in a position to know if and when they are talkative. Actions talk louder than words, especially in war. It is intelligent to be patient and wait.
Sergei Ryabkov (61 years old) and Wendy Sherman (72), the lead negotiators, are what newspapers call seasoned professionals. Seasoning in their cases refers to the pepper and salt in their hair – and also in their methods of speaking in private and public. Ryabkov was born in Soviet Leningrad; Sherman in a Jewish neighbourhood of Baltimore which her father, an ex-Marine then real estate broker, helped to integrate racially, a story Sherman tells in her autobiography. Sherman’s book is not a ticket of leave for doing what Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland tell her to say, and no more.* Sherman’s instructions are less Russia hating, more catholic (as she describes her father).
Taking Sherman at her word, therefore — from what she said in her press briefing after the talks with Ryabkov concluded — it is possible to conclude that she repeated to Ryabkov all the Blinken-Nuland vetoes and provocations which they have advertised in advance; which the White House, the British and Polish prime ministers, and the Secretary-General of NATO (lead images, left to right) keep repeating as if their lives depend on them. And their political lives do depend on them.
That also makes them impotent in the war they are threatening against Russia on all fronts – the Donbass, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Syria, Libya, etc.
However, Sherman made eight points indicating that the “core security interests” which the Russian side has placed at the top of the agenda are now in negotiation with the US. Before you knock on the door, here they are. Read carefully, and watch what comes next.
The three kinds of power which decide the fate of governments are force, fraud and subversion; that’s to say, arms, money, propaganda.
For the time being – and that time is going to be slower and longer than you think — Russian policy has won in Kazakhstan with force, just as it had already fought the US and China to a draw in Kazakhstan with fraud. Russian force has replaced Kazakh fraud in the nick of time, but the swiftness and logistics of the deployment of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) peacekeepers indicate advance planning and preparation. That doesn’t mean conspiracy.
Stanislav Zas, the former Belarus general and now CSTO Secretary General, reported on Monday: “we spent two days on the organisational procedures. Simultaneously, we were deploying the Collective Peacekeeping Forces. Yesterday [January 9], we fully completed this deployment. Over four days, Russian Aerospace Forces planes made over 108 flights. We have deployed contingents of the Collective Peacekeeping Forces in the cities of Nur-Sultan [Astana], Almaty, and Almaty Region. We have established command posts in the Military Institute of Free Troops in Almaty.”
At the same session of the CSTO’s collective security council, the Kazakh President, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, acknowledeged it had been President Vladimir Putin’s “quick solution of the issue of sending a CSTO peacemaking contingent to Kazakhstan” which saved his government. “When the fighters learned that three cargo planes had arrived in the country’s capital [Astana, Nur-Sultan], they gave up on their plan to seize the President’s residence. This enabled us to send more forces to Almaty and recapture the city from the hands of the terrorists. To date, in accordance with the Collective Security Council’s decision, the CSTO Collective Peacekeeping Forces of 2,030 troops and 250 pieces of equipment have been deployed [at] protecting and ensuring the security of airports, military depots and other strategic facilities.”
Kazakhstan is Russia’s “bullet proof vest”, comments an engaged Kazakh source. “You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan last August, plans and preparations for changes in the regional balance of security threat and of counter-force should occur. So they did. Everything that has happened – tragic as it is for the Kazakhs, and sobering for everybody – has taken a long period of time to develop. It is also illogical to say that the decisions taken inside Kazakhstan – for example, the fuel price increase which triggered the protests at the start of the month – were taken overnight.”
As for subversion in Kazakhstan, the Japanese mouth organ in London, the Financial Times, and the rest of the Anglo-American media, claim they are winning the war for hearts and minds, and that Russian intervention is a sign of desperation, weakness, and vulnerability. This is wishful propaganda: because arms and money always defeat propaganda, the war of words has been lost where it counts – inside Kazakhstan.
For the time being, Kazakh and Russian sources believe, there is “likely to be a positive result for the CSTO; a likely positive result for the Kremlin. But the result has also demonstrated the durability of the existing power structure in Kazakhstan. This means that the hopes of the first wave of protesters for a wholesale turnover of the government, and for a fundamental improvement in governance and living standards at the expense of the oligarchs, may have failed. It’s too soon to say.”
What happens next, the sources believe, will depend on how Russian money, and Chinese money, are deployed after the CSTO force is withdrawn Large new credit lines from Moscow and Beijing are likely to be announced; their investment targets and their terms will indicate whether the ownership of Kazakhstan’s valuable assets in uranium, metals, fertilizers, oil, gas, grain and other agricultural commodities will change significantly. Force is protected by secrecy; money less so.
“We can’t be sure how the [Russian] military moves were anticipated, then decided,” adds the Kazakh source. Russian sources in Moscow confirm this. The sources agree that the decision-making process now underway in Moscow and Beijing to move fresh capital into Kazakhstan cannot remain comparably secret. The sources also agree that one thing is certain – the fresh capital won’t be coming from the US or Europe.
It was seventy-nine years ago, in the month of January 1943, that the Battle of Stalingrad ended in the defeat and capitulation of the German Sixth Army (lead image, left). It was, according to the British historian of the battle, Antony Beevor, “the most catastrophic defeat hitherto experienced in German history.” Militarily, it also started the defeat of Germany on all fronts, the end of the war, and the division of Germany and eastern Europe into Russian and American control zones.
The reversal of that outcome, and the steady expansion of the American control zone eastwards, across Germany, then across the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet zones, to the Russian frontier, continues today. Rewriting the story of the Battle of Stalingrad is the propaganda part of this military campaign.
I n 2017 Bevor was awarded a British knighthood as “Military Historian and Author. For services in support of Armed Forces Professional Development”. By that year Beevor’s 493-page history, Stalingrad, was into its third paperback edition, and its cover had been changed from a photograph of Russian troops advancing to a photograph of German troops advancing.
That year too, the British government was three years into the new US-led war against Russia in eastern Ukraine and on the Black and Baltic Seas.
Re-reading Beevor’s history of the Stalingrad battle this month, as Anglo-American state propaganda organs continue broadcasting that Russia is about to start a new war in Europe by invading Ukraine, is a fresh lesson of how relentless race hatred against Russians turns out to be. From this follows the second lesson of Beevor and his book: his sympathy for the German version of race hatred against Russians, pervasive in his history book, prepares readers for a new war against Russians for what Beevor repeats a German officer as calling “a war of two world outlooks” and another calls Russian insects: “Lice are like the Russians. You kill one, ten new ones appear in its place.”
In most countries of Europe (including Russia) race hatred is a crime. In Beevor’s case, it’s military history “in support of Armed Forces Professional Development”.
There can be no sating the hatred for Russia and Russians which is visceral for Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State; and foams at the mouth of Victoria Nuland, the Under Secretary. They are the Blin-Needle gang. They hate with the dedication and derangement of blood-feuding tribals.
They can’t be stopped except by force matching their own, and by fear of defeat for themselves. For the defeat of those they recruit to fight for them, they care not a whit. Likewise, their verbal promises and written agreements.
In this month of December 2021, the thirtieth anniversary of the revolution which replaced the Soviet Union in Moscow with Boris Yeltsin’s government, that revolution has come to its final end because the Blin-Needle gang have gone too far. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov began the month with this categorical – “gone too far”, The month is ending on President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoricals: “Do they really think we do not see these threats? Or do they think that we will just stand idly watching threats to Russia emerge? This is the problem: we simply have no room to retreat…Is anyone unable to grasp this? This should be clear.”
That everything is so clear is something to celebrate for the next fortnight of holidays. It’s also necessary to ensure that this very new year will be a less dangerous one for Russia, and Europe too. Clarity of purpose, energy for action – that’s what the winter holiday is for. To this end, Russians, like the Irish and the British, have long sworn by the restorative energy of porridge for breakfast and pudding for supper. On New Year’s Eve I shall be eating Kasha gurievskaya (lead image, centre).
Guriev’s Pudding is a dessert that has a salutary history. Count Dmitry Guriev (1758-1823) was a court and cabinet factotum for Tsar Alexander I; then his finance minister when cleverer men than he was needed someone else to take the blame for increased taxes. A contemporary wrote of Guriev that he “was never good or smart; only at that time was he young, fresh, hefty, white and blush.” As you also see (right), a hefty eater. And so Guriev has gone down in Russian history as the man who ate so much pudding his name has stuck to it. For it had happened one St. Petersburg evening that the count was visiting a subordinate for dinner, and when it came to dessert, he asked for second and third helpings. So keen he was, he asked his host for the recipe, but was politely refused. Later, he sent a message to his host’s chef, and paid him to leave his employer and move into Guriev’s kitchen. Russian history doesn’t record the names of the host or the chef – only Guriev, the pudding thief.
Here is how Russians cook Kasha gurievskaya today, and what it will look like on my table on New Year’s Eve. After that, there will be dancing to the Grande Chaconne.
Years ago, I told the story of that piece of music, the dance which Louis XIV, the sun king of France and creator of the splendour of Versailles, regarded as his favourite. Its composer was Marin Marais, the son of a shoemaker in a family of roofers. Here’s that story again.
Marin Marais playing the viola da gamba across his knee. For an introduction to his music and his time, watch the film of 1991, Tous Les Matins du Monde.
By the time Marais first came to Louis’s notice, more than a decade had passed since the king had decided never again to dance himself in the ballets staged by his court musicians and choreographers. Marais’s dances were therefore written to be played to the king, occasionally to be performed in front of him by professional dancers, and most often to be played and danced by the music-reading public in their own homes, outside the royal court. Thus, the chaconne is intimate and personal on the one hand, stately and majestic on the other. The combination doesn’t appear again in European music or home entertainment until the waltz of the 19th century. As he sank towards his death, Louis asked more and more for the chaconne to be played to him.
It wasn’t for dancing that Peter the Great had tried for years to be received at Versailles by Louis XIV. But for as long as he lived, the French king rebuffed him. Louis died in 1715, and at the end of 1716 the Regent, who ruled France on behalf of Louis’s six-year old successor Louis XV, reluctantly agreed to Peter’s visit. The reason for the reluctance, explained the Duc de Saint-Simon, the Regent’s private advisor, was that Peter was understood to be seeking a closer alliance with France at the expense of England. The Regent, a weak man under the sway of his pro-English advisors, didn’t want to arouse England’s King George I.
Saint-Simon, who favored a Russian alliance against the English, records in great detail the visit to France of Peter in May and June of 1717. Saint-Simon lacked no sympathy for the tsar, and watched his every move in hope – he wrote much later – that he would “detach us from our servitude to England”. His observations also leave an unvarnished record of Peter’s demeanour. According to Saint-Simon, “everyone marveled at the tsar’s insatiable curiosity about everything that had any bearing on his views of government, commerce, education, police methods, etc.”
As for music, Peter was, unlike Louis, indifferent. He asked the Regent for a mug of beer to keep him going at a performance at the opera; and he left early. According to Saint-Simon, Peter “showed very little interest in objects whose beauty was confined to their value or artistry”. He records that the tsar visited gardens and factories, inspected troops and fortifications, ate a great many dinners, but danced at no balls. The only thing Saint-Simon recorded him as doing with women was an orgy on the evening of May 25. “It did not suit the tsar or his staff to restrain themselves in any way,” it was noted.
Saint-Simon’s story recounts, not only that the tsar brought his own Russian sexual partners in addition to his wife, but he set the former up in the apartment of Louis XIV’s wife, Madame de Maintenon who had moved into a convent after Louis’s death. There Peter insisted on meeting her after he had taken over her bed at Versailles (prequel of a more recent story). Peter’s story is retold here, minus the Russian politics, substance and symbol, of what happened. Then, as now, the Russian strategy was to detach the French from their alliance with the English. Peter’s behaviour with Louis’s widow was intended to show publicly that the English alliance was also moribund.
It was Saint-Simon’s custom to describe physical features as clues to the character of those he observed in his years at the French court. Thus, Peter is reported as displaying “a kind of nervous tic that contorted his entire face and was most alarming; it lasted only a moment, accompanied by a most ferocious stare; then it was gone”. Saint-Simon didn’t report in what circumstances during Peter’s time in Paris the tic appeared. Nor did he speculate about its stimulus. Saint-Simon does report, though, that Peter frequently refused to sleep in the rooms prepared for him, choosing instead camp beds in closets and corridors.
Russian historians differ on whether Peter’s convulsion was more a fit and a family inheritance, than a spasm first brought on when, as a young boy, Peter witnessed his mother’s family being killed during the rebellion (in his favour) of the streltsy (musketeers). Since Peter’s personal cruelty is notorious – Saint-Simon refers only to his appetite for eating, drinking and women – the tic is usually finessed, if mentioned at all in Russian history, as an indication of the stresses on the tsar’s otherwise noble and humane spirit, struggling to contain the even more barbarous conditions around him.
The Soviets had no reason to gloss over the tic, and in the 1940s black and white film Peter I, based on Alexei Tolstoy’s scenario, the tic was made quite visible. It wasn’t hidden either in the colour productions of the 1980s. You might say that, according to Soviet ideology, the tic was a way of showing the contradiction between Peter’s benevolent goals for Russia and his autocratic cruelties in pursuing them.
When Astolphe de Custine, a Paris aristocrat declassed by the revolutionary guillotine, visited St. Petersburg in 1839, his opinion kept oscillating between “admiration [for] an immense city which has sprung from the sea at the bidding of one man”, and the price that was paid. “A taste for edifices without taste,” he concluded. The difference between Versailles and the Winter Palace (now the Hermitage), he noted, was in the thousands of livelihoods sustained by the construction of the former, and the thousands of lives lost during the building of the latter. “Whilst I, though a Frenchman, see nothing but inhuman ostentation in this achievement,” Custine wrote, “not a single protestation is raised from one end of this immense empire to the other against the orgies of absolute power.”
The idea that nowadays Peter and his city have become the symbol of western values in Russia, modernization, anti-communism, Yeltsinite reform – remember he also used to symbolize resistance to such western values as belonged to Karl XII of Sweden and Adolf Hitler – is reason perhaps for celebrating the autocrat. But after 300 years, the tic, too, persists. To ignore it is to be blind.
About St. Petersburg – today, coincidentally, as old as the Grande Chaconne – Custine expressed high hopes, though not for its buildings, nor for its rulers and their manners. “Elsewhere”, he wrote, “great cities abound with monuments raised in memory of the past. St. Petersburg, in all its magnificence and immensity, is a trophy raised by the Russians to the greatness of the future.”
After talking directly with Tsar Nicholas I and the tsarina at a ball in the Winter Palace, Custine describes the dance that climaxed the evening. It was called, he said, a polonaise. “In the palace hundreds of couples thus follow in procession, proceeding from one immense hall to another, winding through the galleries, crossing the drawing rooms, and traversing the whole building in such order or direction as the caprice of the individual who leads may dictate.” For Custine, this dance was the metaphor for Russia’s future. “It is amusing at first, but for those destined to dance it all their lives it is a species of torture.”
The Polish dance is past fashionable. Here, stepping slowly at first then lively, is the Grande Chaconne for the future.
by Editor - Wednesday, December 22nd, 2021 No Comments »
Nations don’t agree to the instrument of capitulation to their conquerors without turncoat Quislings, Lavals, or Sadats to sign.
It happened in Russia, and for the first time on December 21, 2021, in front of the Stavka and the assembled officers of the Russian armed forces, President Vladimir Putin said so.
“Do you remember how it happened?” he asked them. “All of you are adults. It happened at a time when Russia’s relations with the United States and main member states of NATO were cloudless, if not completely allied. I have already said this in public and will remind you of this again: American specialists were permanently present at the nuclear arms facilities of the Russian Federation. They went to their office there every day, had desks and an American flag. Wasn’t this enough? What else is required? US advisors worked in the Russian Government, career CIA officers gave their advice. What else did they want?”
Putin did not have to add the names of the Russians who had signed their answer to that question – whatever you want. Their names are Mikhail Gorbachev; Boris Yeltsin; Yegor Gaidar; Anatoly Chubais; Alexei Kudrin.
It is now one year and one month since there was a direct contact with Russia proving that either Sergei Skripal or Yulia Skripal, or both, are still alive. That was an hour-long telephone call from Yulia Skripal to her cousin Viktoria Skripal on November 21, 2020.
There has been no direct evidence from Sergei Skripal himself that he is alive since he telephoned his family home on June 26, 2019.
Viktoria Skripal told a Moscow press interviewer three months ago that because there was no word from either of them following the death in Yaroslavl of Elena Skripal, Sergei’s mother, on January 7 of this year, she believes they may be dead. “We can assume that they are not alive. Because they knew that their grandmother had died — in any case, we were assured that they had been accurately informed. But there were no condolences, no flowers, none of this from them.”
Reporters from the two Moscow dailies, Moskovsky Komsomlets (MK) and Izvestia, who have been closest to Viktoria, confirm the silence. Alexander Klibanov of MK says he knows of no telephone call or other message from the Skripals this year. “There’s no sign of them,” Nikolai Pozdnyakov of Izvestia adds. He also says there is no definitive proof of their death. “They may be necessary for some new ‘Novichok show’ or something of the sort if the British secret services are going to provide such a thing.”
How to stop the US provocations aimed at pushing Russia to go to war in the Ukraine, and at claiming credit for deterring Russian from doing so? Impossible – the US cannot be stopped. But Germany, the country most likely to suffer the direct effects of war in the Ukraine, can stop the American deployment of nuclear-capable weapons on Ukrainian territory.
Will the war start? Silly question – the war won’t start because it has already started, and has been in active use-of-force mode since February 2014 when the US overthrew the Kiev government of President Victor Yanukovich; attempted to take Russian bases in Crimea; and followed in July of that year with the plot to down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 and trigger a NATO invasion of the Donbass.
Right now on the Ukraine front, Russia will do nothing new; that’s to say, nothing more than it has already done, and is doing. But if and when Germans agree to the Americans deploying nuclear-capable weapons on Ukrainian territory, as they have already done in Romania, Poland, and the Black Sea, then the Stavka in Moscow will do something no western intelligence agency, think-tank, propagandist, and least of all the Japanese mouth organ known as the Financial Times will have anticipated.
For the time being, the Russian assessment is that the US will not make war against Russia directly because it is divided between the Americans who are reluctant, of whom President Joseph Biden is one; CIA director William Burns another; Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two more. Gung-ho by contrast are Secretary of State Antony Blinken (lead image, left) and Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State — the Blin-Needle* gang who are quite recent Americans; their grandparents were Ukrainians. The Russian assessment is that their anti-Russian violence is in part the outcome of their relatively recent capture of state position. For the past three generations, and longer, the Blin-Needle gang has been hating and under-estimating the Russians; they think they have made their successful careers, advancing themselves to the top of the US state, by doing so.
Under-estimating the Russians was a mistake the advancing German army commanders made during the first wave of their invasion eighty years ago. They don’t make the same mistake today.
The Russian tactic, therefore, is to try publicly differentiating the Blin-Needle gang from Biden, Burns, Austin, and Milley in Washington, and from the new German leadership in Berlin of Olaf Scholz (lead image, right). Their coalition can hold together so long as they can keep their proxies – the Ukrainians, Romanians and Poles – on a short leash. Taken together, or separately, these three national groups present no serious risk of war the Kremlin isn’t confident of managing in the short or medium term.
The war problem becomes immediate and much more difficult to manage if and when the US moves its own forces with nuclear-capable weapons into firing positions in these front-line states, in the skies above, and on the Black and Baltic Seas.
If NATO advanced toward the Russian border with the aim of attacking Russia with weapons made of chocolate, the Russian defense and counter-attack strategy, firing Russian-made chocolate, would overwhelm the attackers in the first wave of Russian creme, praline, nuts, waffle, and soufflé.
That’s because Russians, and not only Russians, think Russian chocolate tastes better, with higher quality of ingredients, more variety, and less synthetics, fats, and sweeteners. In 2001, in the only survey of Russian consumer attitudes towards chocolates, including children, it was discovered that “in the image of domestic chocolate products [there were] in particular, a genuine care for the consumer, sympathy with national traditions and patriotism…. Western chocolate products had associations of vitality, well-being and self-confidence, counterbalanced by greed, artificiality and aggression.”
The only way NATO chocolate can conquer Russia is by the Fifth Column – that is, the takeover of the domestic market by the NATO brands Nestlé, Mars, Mondelez, and Ferrero. And this is exactly what has happened. In the current Russian chocolate market, these four manufacturers account for 61% of revenues – the money Russians spend on confectionery. Together, the two US groups, Mars and Mondelez, hold a 29% market share; Nestlé of Switzerland, 24%; Ferrero of Italy, 8%.
Russian chocolate experts see the future for Russian chocolate in rapidly increasing exports to new markets like China where chocolate eating is negligible. But they predict little chance the Russian chocolate manufacturers will be able to take domestic market share away from the foreign companies. This is because, under the pressure of falling income during the pandemic, rising inflation, and shrinking profit margins, Russian chocolatiers are replacing their traditional ingredients with cheap substitutes, wiping out the taste difference and advantage over their rivals.
The British Government announced this week that after cancelling the coroner’s court inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess from alleged Russian Novichok attack, the public inquiry replacing the inquest will not start for more than a year — until February 2023.
Sturgess died in Salisbury District Hospital on July 8, 2018, four months after Sergei and Yulia Skripal were allegedly attacked by Novichok and recovered in the same hospital. The second coroner appointed to investigate, Baroness Heather Hallett, has already ruled officially, and posted on her inquest website, that “the post mortem indicated the cause of her death was Novichok poisoning.” The medical evidence has not been disclosed, tested forensically, or cross-examined according to British coroner’s court standards. Those standards have now been replaced by a more secretive proceeding, called a public inquiry, in which Hallett will play prosecutor, judge, jury, and also censor.
When the public inquiry opens, new papers released in court now reveal, government officials will have designed what they call “a bespoke disclosure strategy” to prevent open cross-examination of witnesses and public analysis of documents, including the ambulance, hospital and post-mortem medical reports. Witnesses and potential whistleblowers, including the three survivors of the alleged Novichok attack – the Skripals and Wiltshire police sergeant Nicholas Bailey – will be excluded as “interested persons” or “core participants” from the ongoing proceeding.
To preserve their silence, and enforce the silence of others on the Wiltshire county police force and at Salisbury Hospital, special “restriction notices” are being prepared – the court papers disclose — for “a regime of ministerial restriction notices and inquiry restriction orders to allow documents or information to be withheld if it is in the public interest.” Hallett will supervise this secrecy operation to prevent “disclosure or publication of any evidence or documents given, produced or provided to an inquiry.” This gag will “continue in force indefinitely.”
This week’s court papers also reveal that the official records now under review of the Novichok investigations have “emanated from the Home Office; the Cabinet Office; the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, Public Health England, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Government Office for Science.” Missing from this list, and thus from the evidence records to be submitted to the public inquiry, are the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the signals intelligence agency GCHQ, and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down.
If Russian military agents had attacked with a Novichok nerve agent, according to the official narrative, these were the front-line agencies in charge.
