What do you base your probability on? Please explain why, because the only evidence seems to be that two Russians visited Salisbury and our pm & fs knowingly lied.
They are now getting jumpy about the lack of evidence they were promised, which has failed to materialise. Been a long time now, hasnât it?
Ever wondered why bellendcat has found something, our police and ss couldnât, using 100s of trained specialists, with the best high tech equipment?
I base my probability on what has been shown to the public.
You have just dismissed that as it doesnât agree with your larger agenda and have just denied but yet to come up with a more sensible version of events.
Tin foilers just like inconsistencies so they can question, they donât like to actually have an opinion on it themselves as that means nailing their colours to the mast to a specific version of events.
You do it all the time.
Explain what you have seen that makes you believe that. Your so sure, so you must know why you are. Lay it all out.
As Iâm saying, not all the evidence has been released.
What are your thoughts on the Russian story? Iâve argued a lot of the points above, so why not answer the Russian side of things?
Frankly, I donât think weâll ever really find out what really happened - but one thing for me is that I genuinely believe those guys worked for the GRU or GU or whoever.
What they were doing there is the big question for me, and where we will see this case âsolvedâ.
Has there been any evidence presented to the public that proves the Skripalâs were poisoned with novichok?
You need more evidence that has been presented so far to convict someone of ABH.
No, and Iâm not convinced they were.
Them being there in the time period.
The interview with RT.
Them being averse to snow being Russian.
Them going all that way to Salisburyâs World famous spire.
If weâre or you really are looking for proof then youâre going to be sorely disappointed, itâll never get to court for many reasons that are to obvious to write.
Evidence? This isnât a court, only a public court of opinion, Russia has been hammering that for years with their news outlets and mouthpieces.
So if they werent novichokked what do you think is the most probable reason for this charade?
i wouldnât have a clue, they were an embarrassment to the Putin regime and the man himself has said they should kick the bucket.
The reason the British are saying Novichok is that what it initially looked like and they donât want to back down.
What they have now done is something quite clever - by asking the Russians to prove they are not GU. Russia canât, as they are. If Russia admit theyâre lying, then theyâre guilty whatever happens to 99% of people as theyâve already lied.
I am still convinced they, and the Russians, did this.
More propaganda?
In the recent U.N. Security Council meeting, U.K. Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Jonathan Allen quoted Putin by the following words (YouTube link, the relevant part starts at 1:07:30):
Traitors will kick the bucket, believe me. Those other folks betrayed their friends, their brother in arms, whatever they got in exchange for it, those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.
Is this an accurate quote? In what context has this been said, i.e., to whom was it referring?
No, on the occasion in question Putin did not say that traitors would be killed. The quote in your question comes from a March 5, 2018 broadcast of BBC Newsnight. It is a concatenation of three soundbites from a three-minute statement in which Putin says that Russia no longer kills traitors. The soundbites come from the last paragraph of his statement in which Putin paints a melodramatic picture of traitors as broken men living out their remaining days in abject misery leading to an early death.
The particular traitor to whom Putin alludes is not Sergei Skripal as some have claimed. He is correctly understood to allude to Colonel Aleksander Poteyev convicted in absentia of betraying deep-cover spies in the United States.
The actual fate of enemies of the Russian state is beyond the scope of the question and this answer. Instead we will discuss the beliefs on this subject which Putin was attempting to instill. He was inviting the Russian people to picture traitors dying friendless and alone Men Without a Country, presumably in apartments strewn with empty vodka bottles.
The translation in the BBC broadcast alters the tone of Putinâs statement and broadens the set of possible meanings of his words to the point that, when they are read in the style used by Western comedians portraying Putin, they seem to convey veiled threats of violence.
Chinese Whispers
The next day (March 6th) the composite soundbite from the BBC broadcast appeared at the head of article on the website of The Sun, now shorn of the context provided in the BBC broadcast. The article describes the statement as a âthreat to âchoke traitorsââ, thereby changing the BBCâs poor translation into an unambiguously false one (as discussed below).
The day after that (March 7th) the Independent put up an article with its own version of the BBC video. The article incorrectly identifies it as a video which âre-emerged onlineâ and describes Putinâs words as âapparent death threatsâ.
Also on March 7th the Telegraph described Putinâs words unambiguously as a âdeath threatâ. This despite the fact that in 2010 they had reported on the very same statement and found exactly the opposite meaning in it. What is more, the Telegraph goes beyond saying that Putinâs words were spoken close to the time of Sergei Skripalâs release to assert that Putin was speaking of him explicitly.
On March 7th on Good Morning Britain Piers Morgan asked Alexander Nekrassov (former Kremlin adviser) what Putin meant by âkick the bucketâ. Mr. Nekrassovâs answers are apparently interpretations of âthey will croak all by themselvesâ which Putin can be heard saying in Russian in the BBC audio. Mr. Morgan sees this as an evasion. Mr. Nekrassov in turn sees Mr. Morganâs interpretation that Putin meant âthey will be killedâ as perverse and becomes annoyed. Neither one of them seemed to know the context of the quote.
On March 12th the video was mentioned in an editorial in the New York Times. The editorial links to the March 7th article in the Independent and quotes the translation from the video. The editors seem to have obtained some information about the TV show during which the statement was made, but this is a bit garbled too. In particular their description of the question is incorrect and they make no mention of the overall import of Putinâs answer.
Also on March 12th Newsweek made explicit the hitherto unspoken assumption that Putin had spoken in the style of âa Mafia boss in the Godfather seriesâ while somewhat incongruously expressing doubt that Putin had been involved in the attempted assasination.
On March 14th an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council was held. Vassily Nebenzia (Russian ambassador to the United Nations) compared high British officials who accused Russia of the poisoning of Sergei Skripal with Inspector Lestrade who regularly got stuck on superficially plausible theory of the crime and when it turned out to be a dead-end was unable to extricate himself without the aid of Sherlock Homes. To this Jonathan Allen, deputy ambassador to the United Nations rejoined:
An finally, my colleague quotes fiction. Let me quote the Russian president when we think about who benefits. In 2010 he said, quote "Traitors will kick the bucket, believe me. Those other folks betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those thirty pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them."
Mr. Allen can perhaps be excused for thinking the quote authentic. It had been bandied about in the press for more than a week almost unchallenged. Putin had spoken on national TV and so nothing stopped the press from going back to look at the original video.
Earlier Western Press Coverage of Putinâs Statement
A preliminary verification would not even have required a knowledge of the Russian language. Putinâs statement had attracted some press coverage in the West at the time he made it. A number of these reports are available online with fuller, more illuminating versions of the quote in superior translations:
Vladimir Putin: Russian secret services don't kill traitors (The Telegraph)
Vladimir Putin says Russian secret service no longer kills traitors (Mirror)
Putin: Russia's Secret Services Don't Kill Traitors (NBC News)
Putin: We Don't Kill Traitors Anymore (CBS News)
Good copy and paste.
Standard tin foiler website for amusement.
Your lost in the propaganda Barry and have nothing to say(except the lies you keep repeating about me),
Try reading it, you might learn something.
I read it a long time ago, I also happen to believe Russia still to this day executes traitors, you obviously donât, or donât want to.
Russia good.
England bad.
Do you believe him?
Really? According to the first eye witness they looked to have âtaken something strongâ and according to Salisbury hospital were not being treated as nerve agent victims. If it canât be proved they were novichokked then Russia have nothing to admit.
So by that you canât disprove nor discount the British version of events?
If so why?
And why do you believe the Russian version with as little or as much proof?
But thatâs the point, the British have left them with no get out.
They had agents, in Salisbury, at the time the Skripalâs were poisoned. Whether Novichok or not, theyâre fucked.