Quoting Mark Twain, President Vladimir Putin has made his first public statement on Syria during his Direct Line broadcast on Thursday. “Whoever wants to imagine Russia weakened…I want to recall the famous man and writer, who once said: ‘The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’”
During four and a half hours of question-and-answer, Putin responded to questions on the Syrian conflict from a US and later a Turkish reporter. He said the future of the Russian bases at Khmeimim and Tartus is undecided. “The vast majority of [Syrian groups] tell us that they would want our military bases to remain in Syria. I don’t know — we should think about it, because we have to decide for ourselves how we relate to the political forces that are now in control and will control the situation in this country in the future. Our interests ought to coincide. If we stay there, then we have to do something in the interests of the country where we are.
”Putin endorsed the Turkish military movements into Syria over the Israeli ones. “Israel is also solving security issues for itself…We hope that Israel someday will leave the territory of Syria, but right now it is bringing in there additional troops. I think there are already thousands of troops. And I have such an impression, that they are not only not going to leave, but they are going to reinforce there…Turkey needs to ensure its security somehow. We understand that all. This is not for today’s meeting, so as not to waste time.”
In the English-language media markets it is impossible for any journalist, editor, publisher or owner to be more corrupt, more of a liar, more of a fraud, and more of a success at selling all three than Rupert Murdoch.
That was until the mass media at which Murdoch excelled were superseded and outread by the alternative media. They call themselves the alt-media, but the alternatives they offer are no more than ideological variants of the same basic market laws which Murdoch has observed and demonstrated. That’s to say, making money at serving state force, fraud, and subversion.
Murdoch was even a success at selling outdoor advertising placards on Russian city streets until he was forced out of that market by men whose crookedness wasn’t greater than his, but who exploited their local political advantage in exactly the same fashion as Murdoch does. The outcome was that in 2011 Russia had the only government in the world able and willing to do real damage to Murdoch – and throw him out. That year Dmitry Medvedev was president; Vladimir Putin, prime minister. By them Murdoch was forced to sell his street signs and radio stations for less than a sixth of his asking price.
Murdoch swore violent revenge for that; he’s been at it against Russia ever since, from The Times to the Wall Street Journal to Fox News to Catherine Belton’s book.
Thirty years ago, as he was dying, Dennis Potter, the British screenwriter, said “I call my cancer, the main one, the pancreas one, I call it Rupert, so I can get close to it, because the man Murdoch is the one who, if I had the time – in fact I’ve got too much writing to do and I haven’t got the energy – but I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press, and the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life.” Now that Murdoch is almost dead himself, and his family is cracking up over – what else? – the money, the cancer he represents in the mainstream media can also be recognized in the alt-media — and in the corner of the alt-media focusing on Russia and the war in the Ukraine. The Ruperts in this corner have names like Seymour and Gilbert.
If watching or reading them can be brain sapping, is there any remedy, and if so, what is it? These and other reader questions are answered in this Direct Line.
President Vladimir Putin gave a party rally speech in Moscow on Saturday in which he omitted to mention seven of the eight domestic issues most troubling Russian voters – inflation; high interest-rate caused stagnation in the economy; corruption; low quality education; poor public health care; terrorism; and illegal immigrants.
He made an exception for the Special Military Operation and “the front to fight for the Motherland”.
To Russians who tell pollsters the protracted war and the casualty rate are their biggest concerns, Putin said not to worry — he and his party are taking care of both: “The United Russia party has been supporting our troops literally from the first day of the special military operation: it submits important draft laws to create legal and social guarantees for our heroes and their families; assists the recovery of the liberated regions; collects and delivers everything the civilians there need. The party also does much for the veterans who are back from the combat areas, helps them realise themselves in civilian professions, in public and political life.”
Reading methodically without departing from his script, Putin told delegates at the 22nd Congress of United Russia that the party stands for “the unity of people, faith in the country and in our victory…the desire to ensure the safety of the Motherland, to protect our sacred historical memory, spirituality, traditions.” This is political boilerplate — and it’s bullet-proof. The polls reinforce Putin’s message with the assurance that Russian voters see and fancy no alternative.
The illustration of power coming out of the barrel of a gun is from a comic book. Contemplating the reality of Russia’s position in Syria, no one in a position to know believes in cartoon captions, the credibility of the gun, or the direction in which the horse is now running.
Military sources in Moscow have told a tale of President Vladimir Putin’s decision not to defend the Syrian Arab Army and the Damascus government of Bashar al-Assad. That decision, the sources claim, was taken at least two weeks before the Turkish break-out from Idlib began on November 27, and was conveyed to Assad personally by December 6.
It had been hinted at four days earlier, on December 2, when Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian, made an urgent telephone call to Putin. In principle, the Kremlin announced, Putin and Pezeshkian agreed on “unconditional support for the efforts of Syria’s legitimate authorities to restore constitutional order and maintain the country’s territorial integrity.”
In practice, there was a Russian condition. Putin told Pezeshkian that Russian anti-aircraft units in Syria would not operate against Israeli attack and defend the Iranian air bridge to Khmeimim for the troops and arms which Assad had been requesting urgently, and which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was ready to send. Putin also told the Iranian President that Russian ground forces and artillery would not engage Turkish forces moving southward, and would not bomb them from the air.
By the time Putin and Pezeshkian were speaking, after days of the closed-door debate with the General Staff, Putin believed he had the word of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Russia’s principal military bases at Tartus and Khmeimim would not be attacked and Russian forces not threatened. Their pre-condition was that Putin would not encourage or defend Iranian reinforcements.
The General Staff and GRU warned Putin that Erdogan and Netanyahu could not be trusted, and that without Russian military force to deter them, plus Iranian troops, they would take over Syrian territory – the Turks down the coast to the Lebanese border and to Damascus; the Israelis across the Golan and the Quneitra buffer zone into the southern outskirts of Damascus.
The Security Council met openly only once with Putin during this debate – on December 5. The official communiqué does not report that Syria was discussed.
“Russia does not betray friends in difficult situations,” was the line the Kremlin told the Foreign Ministry to instruct its diplomats to announce after Assad had landed in Moscow on December 8, adding the footnote that “a deal has been done to ensure the safety of Russian military bases.” The Ministry spokesman, Maria Zakharova, did not go so far. “Our number-one priority is ensuring the safety of the Russian citizens currently residing in Syria, and protecting Russia’s property and its diplomatic, military and other missions,” she said.
Zakharova was signalling there was no deal for the bases short of evacuation from Syria, with terms of safe passage still to be negotiated with the Turks. The camouflage for this is a multinational negotiation the Foreign Ministry is proposing for Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf Arab states, and the United Nations special envoy for Syria.
Asked what reaction Russia has to the Israeli occupation of southern Syria, Zakharova said: “it is incumbent upon all members of the international community, especially neighbouring nations, to exhibit restraint and an elevated level of responsibility by refraining from actions that could provoke further deterioration of the situation in Syria.” Asked what role Israel and the US had played in the invasion and military coup in Syria, she replied: “The situation is being analyzed. There will be even more facts qualifying what happened in Syria.”
Zakharova was not asked for the ministry’s assessment of the part Erdogan had played. Instead, she said: “Our country respects the leaders of friendly countries, maintains dialogue with them and develops relations with them.”
The Kremlin record of Putin’s direct telephone conversation with Erdogan on December 3 claims Putin told Erdogan he should agree “to stop radical groups’ terrorist aggression against the Syrian state.” Erdogan, who initiated the call, didn’t agree.
The General Staff understood Putin to believe that he had the agreement of Turkey, Israel and indirectly of the United States for a de facto partition of Syria into four military control zones, like Germany following Adolf Hitler’s suicide in Berlin on April 30, 1945. The General Staff warned Putin that Russian military capacities in the bases would be too weak to enforce his verbal exchanges with Erdogan and Netanyahu; that a Russian control zone around the bases could not be protected from a forced evacuation; and that if Putin agreed to this, he was risking the destruction of Russian credibility with strategic allies, Iran first of all, then China.
Ex-President Dmitry Medvedev was then sent to Beijing on December 12 to explain and assure President Xi Jinping. Xi has not been reassured. The General Staff messaged Putin, “We told you so”. Now read on.
The defeat of the Russian army in war discredits, not the soldiers who fought and died, but the commander-in-chief and the generals who were in command. Defeat on the battlefield also destroys Russian military honour as a political force in the country, just as its opposite, victory on the battlefield, threatens the civilian commander-in-chief with his replacement by a soldier hero.
To protect himself from his triumphant, and also from his disgruntled officers, the commander-in-chief may make his generals scapegoats for the defeat. Joseph Stalin had begun shooting scapegoat officers before the German invasion of June 21, 1941, and then accelerated his purge in the weeks which followed. In 1946, in the aftermath of the Red Army’s victory over Germany, Stalin neutralized Marshal Georgiy Zhukov (for the second time), stripping him of his command powers and sending him into internal exile, all for purely political reasons. Stalin had allowed Zhukov to lead the victory parade in Red Square but only after Stalin had tried himself and failed to stay in the saddle of the white horse. Stalin’s jealousy of Zhukov’s domestic popularity was compounded by his (not unreasonable) fear of a military putsch and of the Caligula Cure.
For most Russians – and this has been a consistent finding of public opinion polling by the independent Levada Centre of Moscow – the President’s popularity, public trust, and approval of his performance run about 10 points ahead of the Russian trust in the Army. However, the two support each other on the upswing in the polls when there are victories to celebrate; and then on the downswing when there are defeats, rising casualties, and war fatigue across the countryside. Between 2022 and now, for example, Russian approval of Putin has risen to the 80% level; for the Army approval has also risen to about 70%.
It is the conclusion of the Kremlin and of the General Staff, therefore, that they should either hang together or if not, they will hang each other.
Having opposed but obeyed Putin’s orders forbidding them to fire on Israeli aircraft attacking Syria, or on Turkish ground operations in and around Idlib, Moscow sources believe the General Staff have now told Putin much more than the refrain, he’s heard many times before, “We told you so”. This time the General Staff assessment of the invasion of Syria, refusal of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) to fight, and the replacement of the Assad regime in Damascus is that grave damage has been done to the protective alliances which Russia has been promoting in Africa, the Americas, China, and North Korea.
“We just have to accept that Iran and Russia have been comprehensively defeated in their non-fight, “a well-informed Moscow source says. “It is the worst defeat of Russia by the Turks in history. If Putin goes on now to make significant concessions in an Istanbul II negotiation with [President Donald] Trump, that will be the cherry on top of the Turkish halva. We are thinking this; no one is saying it. In the end, a defeat in Ukraine is all we care about. If Putin fails to deliver that, then he has a much bigger problem than the one he has just retreated from. Yes, this is a huge dishonour for us, but nothing is served by talking of it. Still, the situation can be redeemed in the Ukraine. This means the complete and comprehensive defeat of the enemy there.”
A non-Russian military source says the Russians he knows are “in denial. The Turks can now say we have them where we want them. This means the Israelis and the Americans can say the same. That means leverage above and beyond the Levant, in Africa, Asia and no less in Ukraine. What do the Russians have to offer their African or Asian friends now? Do they say — we’ll be there for you, of course, until the end – we mean your end. Of course, when the going gets tough, and potentially that means fighting the Americans or one of its proxy armies, the Russians now show they will blame their unwillingness to fight on their friends’ refusal to do what the Russians advise; their military incompetence; their corruption; or their racial inferiority compared to Russians.”
When former president Dmitry Medvedev (leading image, left), deputy head of the Security Council; the Russian military bloggers; and the GRU’s favoured journalist are as silent on Russian military action in Syria as they are at the moment, the signal they are sending is unmistakeably loud.
It is the sound of recriminations for President Vladimir Putin (centre); for the commanders of Russia’s forces in Syria; for General Valery Gerasimov (right), head of the General Staff, the GRU, and the Defense Ministry – all for having failed to detect, warn, or act on the Turkish, Israeli and American preparation of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces for their drive to Damascus to replace Bashar al-Assad, and allowing the Israeli Air Force (IAF) to stop Hezbollah from reinforcing its units in Syria from Lebanon, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps from flying reinforcements from Iran.
“Yes,” says a well-informed Moscow source, “what we see in Syria is the sum of the worst misjudgements and mistakes the Russians made in the Ukraine. This is the Kremlin for one hundred percent. But in the Ukraine there has been learning from the mistakes and recovery. I don’t believe the defeat in Syria will lead to Putin making more concessions to Washington on Ukraine. On the contrary, I believe it hardens the positions on the Ukraine and releases the General Staff to wage strategic war with the US.”
There is a line of thinking in the General Staff, hinted in reporting by Russian military bloggers, which has proposed to preserve the bases at Tartus and Khmeimim, and establish a defence in depth between the north-south D35 road and the sea. This territory is west of the M5 highway linking Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus, all of which HTS have captured. This roughly approximates the territory known in the Ottoman Empire until 1914 as the sanjak of Latakia.
A reliable military source says “the Russians would need to hold the north-south M53, D35, and D34 highways. This would give [Syrian Special Forces Commander General Suhayl] Hassan the capacity to maintain the defence all along this new border. This means retaking Masyaf, an important road junction west of Hama, and also Rabu.”
Hassan was last reported to have been headed for Latakia; there is no sign that he and his forces are capable of fight.
Assad and his family have arrived in Moscow with family members, the state news agency Tass has reported. Tass added the hint that negotiations are under way for evacuation of the bases. “Russian officials are in touch with representatives of armed Syrian opposition, whose leaders have guaranteed security of Russian military bases and diplomatic missions on the Syrian territory.”
The tactical and operational difficulties are insurmountable, another Russian source believes. He acknowledges there is no sign of the political will for the fight at the Kremlin. There are more signs, the source adds, that the order has been given to negotiate with the Turks a safe-passage agreement for full withdrawal from the country of all Russians.
Local reports are currently indicating that HTS and Turkish forces have moved west of the M5 highway to take Jebla, a town six kilometres from Khmeimim. If true, this indicates that the fight-back option has run out of opportunity on the ground, and will in the Kremlin.
The only senior Russian official to break the silence has been Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. He was speaking in Doha on Saturday, December 7, before the fall of Damascus and the flight of Assad. The HTS operation was understood in advance, Lavrov admitted. It had been “carefully and long planned and is an attempt to change the situation on the ground, to change the balance of power. We will oppose this in every possible way, support the legitimate Syrian authorities and at the same time actively promote the need to resume dialogue with the opposition, as required by UN Security Council Resolution 2254.”
Lavrov also acknowledged the strategic scale of the defeat Russia has suffered. “Nothing goes smoothly in world diplomacy, but the events which we are witnessing today, they are clearly geared to undermine everything we have been doing during those years.”
The head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), General Charles Brown (lead image, right), has just revealed by press leak that he and the chief of the Russian General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, had talked by telephone last week, on November 27, and agreed not to disclose the contents of their call. If that was the point of agreement the two generals reached, Gerasimov has honoured it. Brown has just now decided to break his word.
“At the request of General Gerasimov, General Brown agreed to not proactively announce the call,” the New York Times has reported Brown’s spokesman saying “after he was approached by a reporter about the call”. The newspaper omitted to say that Brown had leaked information about the call in advance, in order to prepare reporters to publish the exchange.
As an exchange of positions between the two generals, the Russian assessment is that once again the American side proves that nothing it says in private, agrees to in public, or signs on paper can be trusted. Sources say in Moscow that Gerasimov and the General Staff will dictate the terms for the end of the Ukraine war “proactively”; that is, when the battlefield is ready, and there is nothing left for Brown to fight or leak.
There has never been a transition between US presidential administrations which has been so replete with new Washington-directed violence across the world. That’s to say, the escalation of wars already under way and the instigation of new ones to the furthest limits of the US empire’s reach.
As the Pentagon war-gaming of the Reagan Administration proved in secret, neither escalation of conventional war nor escalation to nuclear war can be controlled when Americans are running the game. That’s because Americans always think they have firepower superiority (aka shock and awe).
That this superiority has been defeated since 2022 with the destruction of every US weapon and operation plan on the Ukrainian battlefield has spurred the projection of Washington’s denial – that’s Freudian denial — to every other untested battlefield.
Across the Pacific this US escalation now extends from the martial law attempt in South Korea to coup attempts in Bolivia and Venezuela, the threat of trade war against Mexico, and forcing Canada to submit, as Donald Trump has just told Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to “becom[ing] the 51st state and Trudeau could become its governor.” .
Australia, the rich rear base of the US, is under orders to spend more on US arms and bases for US and Japanese forces to fight land, sea, air, and space war against China; for less low-cost raw materials to China, for more tributary payment to the US.
In the Caucasus the US is aiming at escalation to war with Russia in Armenia and Georgia; in the Balkans against Serbia; on the Black Sea and Danube region, Moldova and Romania. Nuclear war stocking has begun in Greece, Germany, Spain, and Poland. In the Middle East, the escalation has already reached genocide for the Palestinians and the demolition of Lebanon. The partition of Syria has resumed. Escalation against Iran is now closer to nuclear exchange than ever before.
This campaign of politics by means of war and war by political means is now existential for both the outgoing and incoming US presidents, and for each of the countries which are their targets. Submission, and the readiness to pay the US demand for billions of dollars in economic and military costs, have become a display of ambition and fear on Roman imperial scale – of the example of the Roman senators ready to kowtow to Incitatus (“Full Speed”), Caligula’s race horse. The Swiss-Serbian geopolitician Slobodan Despot has recently explained this:
“If [European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen appointed her pony as the European Union’s Foreign Minister, do you think anyone would object? And that the brave animal would be less competent in this position than Mr. Borrell [EU Foreign Minister] or Ms. Kallas [EU Vice President]?… What if by chance Caligula had really appointed his equine senator? Without blinking, the senators would have treated him with all the respect due to his rank. These people were probably no dumber than the satraps of today, but they were not driven by their own reason, or even by their well-understood interests. They were spurred on by fear and by its proactive counterpart, sickly ambition.”
Like the Roman senators and the legion commanders of Caligula’s time (37-41 AD), the fear today is of US-directed political, economic, and physical elimination, as has been tested in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Teheran, and in Slovakia on Prime Minister Robert Fico.
For resistance to Caligula’s horse in Washington, President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated signal success. He has also introduced several innovations in counterforce weaponry against the US and its allies from which they have no effective protection, With Kinzhal, Oreshnik and other weapons named but not yet launched by the Russian side, US escalation without counterforce protection or defence of city grids and civilian populations is irrational. The Incitatus Precedent can work only when the emperor is mad and his subjects are in abject fear or mad ambition or both at once.
The outcome of that in first-century Rome was the Caligula Cure – elimination by force.
In the Third Rome these days, there remains a group of high, very high officials who have reason to be afraid of the Incitatus Precedent and the Caligula Cure. They and their oligarch allies have also believed, and for more than twenty years invested in their safe-haven stable beyond the emperor’s reach.
Their names aren’t important to identify; they are well-known. What is important to know for now is what they believe, and especially what they hope the incoming Trump Administration can be persuaded and bribed to do, at least toward themselves.
Vzglyad, the government-financed internet publication in Moscow, is their mouth organ. Yesterday, there appeared in Vzglyad an essay explaining what they are thinking. Their idea, according to the publication, is composed of three options for Russian strategy.
In translating this verbatim into English, illustrations, map inserts, captions, and URL references have been added to assist the reader. As translator I express no opinion, neither strategic, military, Freudian, nor veterinary.
After Yulia Skripal has testified through her doctor that she was attacked with a poison spray in a restaurant minutes before she and her father, Sergei Skripal, collapsed on March 4, 2018, the British Government hearings on what happened have attempted to suppress her evidence.
Yesterday, December 2, the hearings ended with a statement by Jack Holborn, a lawyer paid by the Home Office to say he represents the Skripals, and to claim they agree to the suppression of their own evidence. “Sergei and Yulia Skripal are grateful to this Inquiry for its work,” Holborn said. “Thank you.” Page 158
The retired judge who has directed the hearings, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley – lead image), let slip in his closing statement that he understands the Skripals are dead or incommunicado in prison because he omitted to thank them for their participation. “I am grateful,” Hughes said, “to all the Core Participants and chiefly, of course, to those most closely connected to the events, namely Dawn Sturgess’ family, who have coped, if I may say so, admirably with what must have been at times extremely difficult evidence to listen to.”
Only the Skripals were closer to the events than the Sturgess family or the ambulance crews, police, intelligence agents, doctors, and government officials who have been called to testify on their oaths. But Hughes ruled on September 23 that the Skripals were not allowed to testify either in the open hearing room, behind closed doors, or by remote internet link.
Hughes’s expression of his gratitude to everyone associated with the Novichok narrative except for the Skripals means he is burying them.
The Novichok show trial ended its public hearings last week in London with the revelation that it will not name the chemical constituents of the poison used in the attempted killing of Sergei and Yulia Skripal on March 4, 2018, and in the cause of death of Dawn Sturgess on June 30, 2018.
By doing this, by keeping the chemical formula combination of the poison a state secret, independent British toxicologists say there is no evidence that a Russian-made Novichok was used; and that, instead, a British or US-made Novichok was readily available in 2018, and this was as likely to have been the killer weapon.
Revealed earlier in the hearings by a doctor at Yulia Skripal’s bedside four days after the attack, Skripal believed she and her father had been hit by a poison spray as they ate lunch at a restaurant just before they collapsed outside. Skripal’s evidence pointed to a British operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal before he escaped back to Moscow, and then cover up by planting fabricated Russian clues at the crime scenes, and in the blood test reports of the victims.
The toxicology experts point out that in 2018 scientists working on this type of organophosphate poison had revealed synthesis, production, testing and stocking of A232 and A234 Novichok in the US Army’s chemical warfare centre, known by its location as the Edgewood Arsenal; and at its British counterpart and partner, the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), known as Porton Down. The Iranian military establishment had also done the same by 2016. After the Skripal case in 2018, military chemists in South Korea and the Czech Republic revealed how they had produced and tested their own formulas for Novichok.
By openly publishing their Novichok chemistry, the Americans, Iranians, South Koreans, and Czechs have proved that making, detecting and naming Novichok is a transparent process, not difficult to verify forensically in a criminal investigation or court. This, British scientists now say, means that the refusal of government officials and the Sturgess Inquiry judge, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley, lead image, right), to name the Novichok alleged to have been the Russian murder weapon, is evidence of a scheme of British fabrication and coverup.
Mark Allen (lead image, left) of the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) was the last witness to testify before Hughes at the Inquiry’s public hearings. As head of defence and intelligence, he was also the official in charge of coordinating the intelligence and military units involved in the attack on the Skripals; and then in the police and media coverup employed to pin the crime on the Russian military intelligence agency GRU, and on President Vladimir Putin.
Allen’s testimony on November 28 identified as his direct superior Sir Mark Sedwill, the national security advisor reporting to then-Prime Minister Theresa May and then-Foreign Minister Boris Johnson.
“As SRO [Senior Responsible Owner] for Russia,” Allen said, “when we’re dealing with Russia strategy, the Government strategy towards Russia, I bring together all government departments, including representatives of the agencies as well, to ensure that we’re all essentially using all of our levers, all of our information, all of our understanding is pointing in the same direction and we’re being coherent. Then where there are situations where something unexpected arises, what you might call a crisis of some sort, then I will also chair that sort of grouping to work out what our collective response should be.”
“I act, not as the Foreign Office’s DG [director-general], but as the government’s senior official. Page 17 Asked to substantiate public statements at the time by May, Johnson and Sedwill that only Russia could have made and used the Novichok weapon, Allen was unable.
“… it is safe to say that any modern chemical laboratory is capable of synthesising Novichok. In contrast to what you have said about it being a state — really only something that can be done at the state level. Is there anything that you can add to this debate, Mr Allen? A. I don’t think that is a view that is shared in the scientific community, or in the OPCW.” Page 41.
This was a lie; Hughes let it go unchallenged.
“LORD HUGHES: As far as you know, is it something which has been asserted either by Mr Mirzayanov or by the other publications of American, Czech, Italian, et cetera, researchers?
“A [Allen]: I haven’t read those in detail, sir, so I couldn’t say.
“What’s in a name like Novichok? Why the coverup?” responds an independent British chemist and expert on organophosphates. “If the full molecular readout was exposed publicly from the blood sampling of the Skripals and Sturgess — also later of [Alexei] Navalny — then it would be obvious that some constituents are missing. And because they are missing from the name or the reported chemical formula, then identification of Novichok cannot be made. All we are left with is an assumption covered up and concealed in secret. The scientific name for that is a lie.”
