More than two weeks into the war in Ukraine, and the unthinkable is not only being thought, it’s being said out loud: could Putin use nuclear weapons?
The Ukrainian forces’ tenacity in fighting back has been extraordinary, but could it make Putin even more dangerous? And what happens if he fails with conventional weapons? Will he use unconventional ones next?
It’s the right question. It’s just four years too late. Because he’s already used unconventional weapons. Not in Ukraine, but right here, in Britain. On 4 March 2018, Putin deployed a chemical weapon against a civilian population. Our civilian population. Us.
The poisoning of Sergei Skripal may have played out in the British press as a “botched assassination attempt”, but that’s just half of a more terrifying story. Because Salisbury is not just a pretty, quintessentially English market town with a famous cathedral, which Skripal’s poisoners mocked us with when they claimed to have visited it. It’s also a home to the British military establishment, and some of its highest ranking officers, adjoining the biggest military training ground in Britain, Salisbury Plain.
And Putin struck at its heart. Was it Skripal he was after? Or Salisbury? Or, as it turned out, both? Because two Russian soldiers – military intelligence officers from the GRU agency – caught a commercial flight to London, sauntered down a Salisbury street without making any effort to disguise themselves, in full view of 100 or more security cameras, and released a deadly nerve agent. And then? Then they threw away the bottle.
Three months later, an Amesbury resident, Charlie Rowley, fished it out of a charity bin and gave it to his girlfriend, Dawn Sturgess. She died, agonisingly. This was a British citizen murdered by the Kremlin.
But here’s what’s worse. What if she hadn’t been given the vial? What if the bottle had gone to the charity shop? Or into a bin lorry? Or been crushed and taken to the tip? Or had entered the water table?
In a recent interview, Fiona Hill, formerly the national security adviser on Russia to Donald Trump, makes her thoughts on the incident plain. “There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people,” she said. It proved Putin was prepared to use any “cruel and unusual weapon” he has, she said. “And he wants us to know that.”
He wants us to know that. And, by Hill’s analysis, the poisoning of Sergei Skripal looks less like a “botched assassination attempt” and more like a botched terror attack. At the very least it was a stark, unmistakable message from Russia to Nato, the very definition of hybrid warfare: a combined military and information operation.
Certainly, governments around the world read it as such. It was an seen as an attack on Nato. There was unprecedented international cooperation: Nato agreed and imposed sanctions. Hundreds of Russian “diplomats” – spies – were expelled from embassies around the world.
But what we now must recognise is that the British government’s response to the Skripal poisoning, and specifically Boris Johnson’s role in it, was a glaring national security failure.
To understand this, we need to rewind a few months earlier. On 30 October 2017, the FBI made it known that its investigation into Russian interference in the US election, led by special counsel Robert Mueller, had begun in London. Two days later, on 1 November, the Labour MP Chris Byrant asked Johnson, then foreign secretary, whether he had seen any evidence of Russian interference in British elections. “Not a sausage,” he said. “Niet.”
Yet two weeks later Theresa May, then prime minister, made a landmark speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet: “Russia,” she said. “We know what you are doing. And you will not succeed.” She also detailed how Russia had mounted “a sustained campaign of cyber, espionage and corruption. This has included meddling in elections.” And, crucially, she acknowledged the “weaponising” of information via social media, Russia’s information warfare that was a significant part of the FBI’s investigation. Three months later, Putin sent her a weapons grade nerve agent on a Moscow-London Aeroflot flight.
But it doesn’t end there. Because that April, Johnson flew to Nato’s headquarters in Brussels and met the US secretary of state and the rest of the alliance’s foreign ministers: it was a crucial, highly sensitive meeting to discuss how Nato would deal with Russia ahead of its July summit.
A year later, the Guardian would reveal that Johnson had travelled directly from that summit to the Italian villa of Evgeny Lebedev, the UK-based Russian newspaper proprietor. It published a photograph showing him alone and dishevelled at San Francesco d’Assisi airport, no security in sight.
And four months after that, in November 2019, we reported in the Observer a singular fact: that Alexander Lebedev, Evgeny’s father, an ex-KGB officer, had flown in to join him. Anyone with any knowledge of Russian intelligence will tell you there is no such thing as an ex-KGB officer. But, as ever in Britain, we latch on to the wrong details at the wrong time: last week, following news reports, it became a scandal that Johnson had made Evgeny a lord against the advice of his own security services (he denies interfering in the appointment).
Of course, it is. But the meeting with Alexander Lebedev is of another order. And it isn’t a scandal, it’s a national security failure. And it must now be investigated.
The meeting with Alexander Lebedev was undertaken without a security protocol, the knowledge of his department officials or, it must be assumed, the prime minister. And when it became known, Johnson should have not just been sacked, he should have been questioned by both the police and the prime minister. Except, by the time the Observer revealed it, Johnson was the prime minister.
We have to finally understand what has happened here. Russia’s attack on our democracy has been covered up. It’s what the parliamentary intelligence and security committee’s Russia report revealed beyond all doubt. And all available evidence suggests this cover-up leads back to Johnson. It was Johnson who claimed there was “not a sausage” of evidence. It was Johnson who suppressed the report’s publication. And it was Johnson who had direct oversight of MI6 as foreign secretary when, as the report said, it “actively avoided” investigating.
It shouldn’t have taken the prospect of a third world war to reveal this. And it didn’t. It has been in plain sight for two and a half years. It is in plain sight now. And our national security depends on us all finally seeing it.
