UK Edition
Moscow likes to mock its adversaries. When the UK released its evidence on the Skripal case, Russian officials compared Theresa May’s dance style to that of a press chief in the Russian Foreign Office. And yesterday’s broadcast of an interview with the two prime suspects was pure farce. What were they doing in Salisbury in March? Visiting the cathedral, said Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – neither of whom looked like they collect brass rubbings – “famous for its 123 metre spire... the clock... the oldest of its kind in the world”. The answer sounded cribbed from Wikipedia, and their explanation for spending so little time in Salisbury was, frankly, not very Russian: there was too much snow.
By refusing to take the Salisbury attack soberly, Vladimir Putin softens its horror and sows doubt. The bigger the lie, the better: it prompts some to ask, would the Russians really fabricate something so obvious? And just as obsessives will pick apart a strange shadow in a single frame of the moon landing, so the gullible or the malicious will insist that the Skripal case must be a stitch-up.
The truth, however, is terrifyingly simple: a nerve agent was used on British soil that did not kill its intended targets but did kill a bystander. And Moscow’s explanation is clumsy because, in Russia itself, Mr Putin is used to doing whatever he wants and inventing lazy stories to cover for it. He is laughing at the British.
Britain has not risen to the challenge. The Government is reluctant to go after Russian money in the UK and hides behind the EU as an excuse. The EU is just as slow to act because some of its most powerful members rely on Russian energy supplies. Meanwhile, the West is getting beaten in the propaganda war. Russia undermines our elections not by directly fixing votes – as a few on the Left like to imagine – but by flooding our system with such noise and nonsense that it starts to look silly. The British state tries to rise above it all – sometimes for sound reasons – but politicians need to understand that reserve and love of bureaucratic procedure are letting the side down.
The UK took seven months to make its case against Mr Putin and shared far too little with the media; Yulia Skripal has given just one interview. The time has come to take the propaganda fight to the Russians – to demand, if nothing else, that they take this grisly crime seriously.
Britain must rise to Russia’s challenge