New evidence has surfaced from interviews with sources at the Salisbury undertaker and crematorium in charge of the obsequies for Dawn Sturgess, whose death at Salisbury District Hospital on July 8, 2018, is the only death officially recorded from the Novichok nerve agent. Their testimony raises fresh doubts that Novichok was the cause of her death, and suspicion that the two state coroners and two state pathologists responsible for the investigation have been concealing material evidence of timing and records in the case.
Why would Orthodox Christian Russia, led by a believer, ally itself with Protestant America and Catholic Europe to encourage the Israeli Jews to liquidate a rebellion of Palestinian Arabs, mostly Moslem, after they tried to defend one of their Holy Places from Jewish invasion, and counter-attacked with more military resourcefulness than the Crusader Alliance has seen for many years?
Holy Places mean to believers what red lines mean to soldiers. Crossing them is an immediate reason to open fire. Since ancient times there has been an invariable rule of war on the territory of Palestine – set the locals at war with each other but never allow one to be strong enough to challenge imperial rule. The red lines have been drawn accordingly. From the Greeks to the Romans, Byzantines, Caliphs, Ottomans, and then the Soviets, the rule was never to allow Israel to become too strong; the red line in Palestine was the one Israel’s forces should never dare to cross.
As the Israelis have been breaking the rule by crossing the red lines to expand their territory, the Russians have broken the rule by accepting and giving ground. The first time was by Boris Yeltsin, who was never his own master outside Russia’s borders or inside; and now, in the past month, by Vladimir Putin. For this reason, disallowing Israel from becoming too strong has been the dividing line between the Russian General Staff, Defence Ministry, the intelligence services, and lately the Foreign Ministry, who have stuck to the rule and the red line; and Putin who has not. Although this rule is a strategic one, a reason of state, not an article of religion, Putin’s position – unexplained in public – is one of personal conviction endorsed by the Church and Patriarch Kirill.
Understanding that this has happened before requires a historical reference. For today, the point of comparison is the “Concordat” negotiated by Napoleon and Pope Pius VII between 1800 and 1801. Comparing doesn’t require taking the side of the Pope as he plotted war against Napoleon; signed an agreement on terms for the subordination of the church to the state; was taken prisoner of war as he tried to break the pact to the Church’s advantage when Napoleon was losing his power on the battlefields of Russia and Waterloo.
What these histories 220 years apart tell us – the history of the Concordat signed on July 14, 1801, and Article 67.1 of the Russian Constitution, signed on July 3, 2020 — is the same. Religion is not only the belief of the people (some of them), it is an ideology of rule in which religiosity is the camouflage for a campaign of territorial conquest and economic enrichment. Documenting this is a new book by Ambrogio A. Caiani, just published by the Yale University Press, which claims to demonstrate how, between 1800 and 1812, Napoleon of France, impious revolutionary, committed secularist, cruel imperialist, was defeated by Pius VII, representative of the superior church of the true God.
The author, a confessing believer, displays his partisanship for the Pope against Napoleon; this should not detract from the value of the parallels with the story in Russia today, as the Palestinians celebrate their moral victory over Israel; as Putin celebrates the birthdays of the Pacific Fleet and of Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, but keeps his silence on Palestine.
It has been eleven years since the Levada Centre, the independent national polling organisation in Moscow, reported a survey of Russian attitudes towards the Palestinians and the Israelis. “We had such a poll in 2010,” Denis Leven, a Levada sociologist, said yesterday. “I can’t say exactly if we are going to make another one in the near future. Now we focus on the events in Russia and neighbouring countries.”
This isn’t true; in recent weeks, Levada has polled Russians on their attitudes towards Turkey, the US, the European Union, China, as well as the states which Russians regard as enemies — Great Britain, Poland, the Baltic states, Germany, France, Japan, and Canada.
Speaking for the rival national pollster, the All-Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM), Diana Osyanina says “we aren’t planning to make a poll about this [Palestine-Israel] conflict because now we focus mostly on the domestic issues.” VTsIOM’s last published poll on the conflict appeared in January 2018; it focused on Russian views of whether Tel Aviv or Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel. The majority couldn’t say.
Since the fighting began at the start of May, the mainstream Russian media report no public demonstrations anywhere in the country in support of either the Palestinians or the Israelis. The domestic media have not sent reporters to the areas of fighting; their news bulletins have been perfunctory and compiled from non-Russian sources. Military media such as Colonel Cassad and Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) have reported little. Vzglyad, reflecting Russian intelligence agency thinking, has published one hostile piece against the Palestinians, one neutral situation report, and one technical military assessment of the drones which Hamas has been using at sea, off the Israeli coast, and against land targets, as well as the start of Iranian drone firing from Syria.*
The Russian Orthodox Church which has long maintained pilgrimage sites, churches and monasteries in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, said through its press spokesman Vladimir Legoida that it has issued no press release on the conflict or official statement from the Patriarch himself; Metropolitan Hilarion, head of the department for external church relation; or the Church’s organs in Jerusalem.
The Palestine state ambassador to Moscow, Abdel Hafiz Nofal, was reported by Tass on Tuesday (May 18) as calling for direct talks between Palestine and Israel in Moscow “at any time…even tomorrow because we are confident in Russia.” The next day he was asked how he explains the lack of public support for the Palestinians in Russia. He refuses to say.
In the 50-year history of the nerve agent Novichok, no human being has died from it with the exception of Dawn Sturgess in Amesbury, Wiltshire, on July 8, 2018. Only Sturgess didn’t.
The cause of her death, according to the post-mortem performed the next day, July 9, 2018, by Philip Lumb (lead image, right), was “post cardiac arrest hypoxic brain injury and intracerebral haemorrhage”, according to the report he signed. This means that Sturgess suffered from a heart attack, which then stopped the flow of oxygen to her brain (hypoxia). An unfortunate, but also very common cause of death, according to the medical research. Lumb did not report what caused Sturgess’s heart to stop.
Lumb is a career pathologist registered with the Home Office for suspicious death forensic investigations in the northwest England and Wales, and a consultant at Sheffield’s Medico-Legal Centre, one of the leading medical forensic centres in the UK. He is also current president of the British Association in Forensic Medicine, the standard-setter for the country. Lumb has a sharp sense of his professional and ethical duty. “If you make a mistake,” he has told a press interview, “somebody could go to prison for 20-odd years.”
Lumb didn’t make a mistake with the sequence of events which killed Sturgess – heart failure, then loss of oxygen to the brain, then brain death. But this wasn’t what the British government (lead image, left) wanted to hear. So a second pathologist was called in to conduct a second post-mortem on July 17. His name is Guy Rutty (centre), once a colleague of Lumb’s at Sheffield and also a professor. But Rutty didn’t sign his name to his report on the cause of Sturgess’s death until November 29. The interval was four and a half months.
That second report, kept secret for another two and a half years, was revealed in the Wiltshire coroner’s court on March 30 of this year. The cause of Sturgess’s death, which Rutty signed and which was sworn to by the counsel for the coroner, was read out in court: “Ia post cardiac arrest hypoxic brain injury and intracerebral haemorrhage; Ib Novichok toxicity”.
Semi-colons are punctuation; they have no medical or logical meaning. British toxicologists and pathologists consulted for the interpretation of Rutty’s cause of death report say it is highly unusual for its lack of precision on sequence, cause and effect; and for the order Ia/Ib which Rutty signed. The toxicologists believe that paralysis of the lungs leading to asphyxiation is the usual trigger for death by nerve agents.
No toxicologist, forensic pathologist or registered Home Office post-mortem investigator can be found who will explain why after the two post-mortems on July 9 and July 18, a delay would be required to produce the November 29 finding. Lumb and Rutty refuse to provide details of their roles in the two post-mortems or to explain the delay between them and the official report.
Rutty referred his questions to Martin Smith, the newly appointed solicitor to the new inquest and a veteran of politically sensitive inquests in the past. “As you have no formal role in the inquest proceedings,” Smith has responded, “it would not be appropriate to provide you with the information that you have requested.”
These details of the only Novichok fatality in history are the nails in the proverbial horseshoe for loss of which the battle was lost, then the kingdom.
There are a few kilometres of flat country between the Golan border of Palestine, occupied by Israel, and Damascus, capital of Syria – perfect visibility, no cover, optimum for Israeli air and artillery attack, and also for Syrian and Iranian drone counterattack.
Between the occupying Israelis and the occupied Palestinians on the Israel side of the line, the Kremlin and the Russian General Staff, victors in the Syria War, say they are unable to see daylight; that’s to say, they can’t distinguish between attacker and defender. For Russians at daily war themselves defending against the encroaching attacks of the NATO allies not to see this, but instead to accuse the Palestinian defenders of provoking their victimisation and losses, as well as to deny the Palestinians their rights of state sovereignty and national liberation with whatever forces they have – this is the contradiction of President Vladimir Putin.
It’s a contradiction the General Staff, the intelligence agencies, the Defence and Foreign ministers are acutely aware of right now.
Nicholas Bailey (lead image), the Wiltshire county police sergeant who was a support player in the British Government’s first Novichok attack on the Kremlin, has demanded money for himself with the threat that if he doesn’t get it, and soon, he will go to the High Court in London. There, he is threatening to tell everything he knows about the alleged poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal on March 4, 2018. That was one of the makings of the promotion of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the fattening of the pockets of the MI6 intelligence agency and the Cabinet Office. It was the prequel of the second Novichok attack on the Kremlin, staged by Alexei Navalny last August, in which he demanded to become president of Russia.
OMG!
If Bailey tells the truth about the fabrications in his case, will he trigger the downfall of the British government, the outgoing German government, MI6 , CIA, the German secret service BND, the German Army laboratory in Munich, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, everyone else who believes the Novichok story; and put a stop to the allied war against Russia?
In stakes as mighty as these, how much money can Bailey’s silence be worth?
Accused Russian bank robber Vadim Belyaev (lead picture) – US alias Vadim Wolfson – has won an order from the New York State Supreme Court dismissing the claims of his pursuers, National Trust Bank (NBT, Trust) and Otkritie Bank of Moscow, on condition he registers himself as a defendant in the same claims the two banks are making against him in a Moscow court. Judge Joel Cohen issued his order ending the eleven-month case on May 4. He has not published his reasons.
On the face of it, Cohen has done no more than conclude that he should concede jurisdiction over Belyaev and the bank claims to a Russian court, where proceedings are already under way. In practice, as the banks’ lawyers have pointed out in New York, whatever the Moscow courts decide, Belyaev, now living in New York, has no intention of complying with its judgements, calculating that the US courts will not allow bank recovery of Belyaev’s ill-gotten gains so long as they are safely stored in US banks.
Russian laughter has weaponised – and that’s no joke.
Nor is it new. This month is the 185th anniversary of the first stage performance of The Government Inspector (Ревизор, Revizor), the work launching the fame of its author Nikolai Gogol. The laughter which the play, then the book drew from May 1, 1836, was followed by this autobiographical acknowledgement from Gogol six years later, when his equally famous book, Dead Souls(Мёртвые души, Myortvyi dushi), appeared.
“Lofty ecstatic laughter,” Gogol said, “is quite worthy of taking its place beside the loftiest lyrical gust and…it has nothing in common with the faces a mountebank makes. The judgement of [the author’s] time does not admit this and will twist everything into reproof and abuse directed against the unrecognised writer; deprived of assistance, response and sympathy, he will remain, like some homeless traveller alone on the road. Grim will be his career and bitterly will he realise his utter loneliness.”
Against US warmakers like President Dementia (старый маразматик “Old Marismatic” ) and the Blin-Noodle Gang, Chancellor Merkel, Prime Minister Johnson, and their president-in-waiting-for-Russia, Alexei Navalny, Russian joke-making is a weapon against which the allies have nothing comparable, no counter-measure. Exceptional Gogol believed Russians to be, compared to Germans, French, British, or Americans. Exceptionalist the latter believe themselves to be, compared to Russians. Still, the one uniquely exceptional weapon Russians wage in war is their laughter at their enemies. The others caricature or cartoon the Russians, but they hate too earnestly, so they can’t laugh at them.
The pranksters Alexei Stolyarov (lead image, right) and Vladimir Kuznetsov (left) – Lexus and Vovan are their respective stage names — explain that making jokes at the expense of those in power inside Russia had been worth doing until war was declared against Russia. Now, they say, their jokes aim at laughing at those who are much worse. Gogol didn’t get so far.
When Alexei Navalny and his aides met in Germany in January with the US, British and German intelligence services, they agreed that Navalny would cease to be what he imagines himself to be, the front-running candidate for president of Russia, if he followed Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky into permanent exile abroad. The agents also reminded Navalny that his two predecessors could count on more of their own personal cash to pay for the standard of living and attention to which they were accustomed, than Navalny could. On account of his vanity and their cash, they had Navalny over a barrel.
So return to Russia he must, they decided. They also agreed that if that happened, Navalny would go to jail.
Navalny was assured that if he could accept that, the western allies would do their best, as publicly as possible, to make his stay in prison as politically powerful as possible – and shorter than Khodorkovsky’s ten years. Navalny was complimented that President Joseph Biden, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised personally to say his name aloud, not to mention the leaders of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Australia, whose names and influence Navalny esteemed less. Turning the courtroom and then his jail cell into Navalny’s new political platform, he was convinced, was the necessary new stage since Operation NOVICHOK and Operation PUTIN PALACE were fizzling out.
Not for the first time, Navalny has miscalculated.
