Vlad bags another one

In a court of law the evidence against my friend Vlad would be regarded as strictly circumstantial. Innocent until proven guilty and all that.

But between us boys we know that Vlad murdered (well, tried to) Sergei Skripal as surely as we would had he been caught running away from the scene, toxic aerosol in hand.

Vlad’s outlook on life was formed in street gangs and later refined in the KGB. In that street gang with megalomania, officers are taught that, if coincidences number more than two, they aren’t coincidences. And in Skripal’s case, coincidences abound.

Col. Skripal, GRU, was in 2006 caught spying for MI6. He was sentenced to 13 years in a hard labour camp, the slow version of capital punishment. Four years later he and a few others were exchanged for a gaggle of Vlad’s spies led by the femme fatale (that’s the French for whore) Anna Chapman.

Skripal was first flown for a debrief in the US, but then settled in Wiltshire. That’s when coincidences began to pile up.

First Skripal’s son was killed in a car accident. Then, last year, the same fate befell his wife. And now he and his daughter are fighting for their lives, having been poisoned with an unknown substance in a Salisbury shopping mall. A few months before that, Skripal had reported threats to his life.

I don’t know what the odds are in favour of one family suffering all these misfortunes within five years, but they can’t be very high. If you disagree, start buying lottery tickets – you’re bound to win millions quickly.

However, I stand corrected. A highly credible, nay unimpeachable, Russian source indignantly denies any FSB role in the attempted murder.

“The English suffer from phobias. Whatever happens to Russians, they immediately look for a Russian connection… It shouldn’t be excluded that the media are trying to fan around this incident yet another scandal involving Russian special services.”

This highly credible, nay unimpeachable, source is Duma deputy Alexei Lugovoi who in 2006 poisoned in London another Russian, Alexander Litvinenko, with polonium-210. Lugovoi’s guilt wasn’t established in a court of law because Vlad refused to extradite him for questioning. However, the evidence against Lugovoi is enough to convict 10 murderers, which of course doesn’t mean that his current protestations lose any of their credibility.

Vlad learned how to deal with enemies in his two schools of life: street gangs and the KGB. Accordingly in his inaugural address he promised to hunt terrorists down wherever they may be. “If they hide in the bog, we’ll whack’em in the shithouse,” explained Vlad in the only idiom that comes naturally to him.

(One would think that a chap possessing two post-graduate degrees would be able to express himself somewhat less trenchantly, but don’t be misled by diplomas. Just the other day, the daughter of the Chancellor of Petersburg’s Mining University described how her father wrote, cut and pasted Putin’s doctoral dissertation. Since then the academic has become a billionaire, which, considering his salary, testifies to extreme frugality coupled with a successful investment strategy.)

Enlarging on that presidential promise, Vlad later said: “Traitors always end in a bad way. Usually from a drinking habit, or from drugs, right in the street.” Or else from the world’s first act of nuclear terrorism, one should add.

The substance used to whack Col. Skripal is unknown, and consequently so is any possible antidote. In Litivinenko’s case, polonium-210 was detected by sheer luck, and, one suspects, that elusive commodity will be required here as well.

It’s known that FSB laboratories have been working hard on developing undetectable toxins and methods of their delivery. This effort goes back to the first days of the Bolshevik power.

One of the first acts of that young, idealistic republic was to establish two laboratories within the CheKa structure: one specialising in counterfeiting, the other in poisons. The latter is still in business and by all accounts doing famously, and it would take unlikely credulity to suppose that the former isn’t.

Hence from 1917 onwards Russia’s presence in the world has been toxic in both the narrow and broad senses of the word. It has to be said that Russia had never been a particularly nice country – it’s not for nothing that back in the nineteenth century she was called ‘the gendarme of Europe’ and ‘the prison of nations’.

But neither was she a downright criminal state. That metamorphosis was perpetrated by the Bolsheviks, aggravated by the Soviets and is now being further advanced by Putin’s kleptofascist junta – to the applause of ‘populists’ everywhere.

Trained in both street and state crime, Vlad will always push as far as he can get away with. He’ll steal Russia’s natural resources, other countries’ territory, doctoral dissertations and anything else within reach.

And he’ll do murder at home and abroad – provided he goes unpunished. This presumably is what makes him the strong leader some of our pundits who’ll remain nameless, such as Peter Hitchens, wish we had.

A statesman’s strength would indeed be welcome, but not the strength of a mafia godfather. If our leaders were strong, they’d immediately freeze all Russian assets in Britain, expel their holders and sever diplomatic relations with Vlad’s bailiwick.

Instead they’ll mumble casuistic half-truths about insufficient proof and, at best, slap Vlad on the wrist with a few more or less painless sanctions. To someone of his pedigree this is tantamount to an open-ended licence to kill on British soil.

And this used to be such a decent place…