Life's A Riot With Spy Vs Spy.

Everyone remembers what happened in Salisbury in the spring and summer of 2018. In March, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia went for a meal in Zizzi, had a drink in a local pub, and were then found collapsed on a nearby park bench. They'd been poisoned.

Later in June, in nearby Amesbury, Charlie Rowley gave his girlfriend, Dawn Sturgess, a bottle of perfume he'd found as a present. Within fifteen minutes, Dawn was ill and eight days later she was dead. A victim of what appeared to be the same nerve agent, Novichok, that hospitalised, but didn't kill, Sergei and Yulia.

I was at Skeptics in the Pub - Online - How to Hunt Russian Spies from the Comfort of Your Own Home with Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins - to find out a little more about both that case and the work Higgins and his organisation Bellingcat have done to uncover the activities and murders carried out by Russia in recent years.

With over three hundred and twenty people in attendance I wasn't alone. It shows how much interest there is out there in this stuff and though Bellingcat also carry out investigations into activities in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, USA, Syria, Ethiopia, and Cameroon it is their work on the Russian front that attracts the most attention.

Higgins, a fantastic, articulate, and open speaker, has become something of a thorn in the side of Putin's regime and, in a generous Q&A session that followed the talk, he spoke about how the Russian state media have falsely claimed he works for the CIA, GCHQ, MI5, and/or the MI6, that Bellingcat is a fake news website, and that Higgins himself doesn't even exist.

It doesn't matter if all, or many, of these stories contradict each other. The Russian method is not to create a believable lie but to sow distrust and suspicion everywhere. Higgins certainly looked like he existed to me although he did speak about the threat to his existence his work has brought about. 

When he travels (which is not so much at the moment - for obvious reasons) he can't eat food in restaurants or hotel bars and doesn't even dare to take snacks from his minibar or get room service for fear of being poisoned. Bellingcat make every effort to keep the addresses of their offices secret and Higgins makes a point of checking in regularly with counter terrorist police officials.

When you're upsetting Vladimir Putin, your life, make no mistake, is in danger. A former blogger, Higgins launched Bellingcat in 2014 as a website for citizen journalism, created using open space information that could be found on smart phones and via satellite technology among many other places.

The site specialised in human rights abuses and the criminal underworld, particularly when carried out in war zones and instantly drew attention to itself with its findings relating to the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. A Boeing 777 on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was downed while flying over Ukraine resulting in the loss of 298 lives.

Russia had tried to pin the blame for this terrorist action on Ukraine but Bellingcat were able to prove, later confirmed by a Dutch led joint investigation team, that Russia had been responsible. The story of that would be a talk, and a blog, of its own so I'm not going into depth (and neither did Higgins) but it is important for some background on what Bellingcat do and why they do it.

Back in the UK, the names of two suspects for the Skripal poisoning suspects had come to light, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, but were they real names? Nobody much thought so. Just as nobody really bought the story they spun on Russia Today that they'd been on a two day holiday in the UK and, despite staying in London, had decided to spend both those days visiting Salisbury to admire its catherdral's 123 metre spire.

You might have thought Bath, Oxford, and Cambridge would have offered an alternative day out if they'd tired of the capital so quickly. The idea that Petrov and Boshirov worked together in the sports nutrition industry and were simply enjoying two days on the trains between Salisbury and London was, clearly, not even intended to look true. When a claim was made that these Russians found the weather a bit too cold in Britain they seemed to be simply taking the piss.

But that didn't help, necessarily, in revealing their true identities and who they were working for. Everbody knew who they were working for but proof in these cases is relevant if not, sadly, a step towards justice.

The sheer amount of Russian bureaucracy, and the level of corruption within the country, means there are a lot of leaks of information in that country but Petrov and Boshirov didn't seem to be turning up anywhere. At least to begin with. Until somebody at Bellingcat found a Russian news site that had the booking data for their flights from Moscow to London and back.

It seemed strange that these 'tourists' only booked their holiday the night before they took it and it seemed even stranger that the numbers of their passports were only three digits different from each other, as if they'd been produced very very close together.

Further investigation into the full travel details for these passports revealed that Petrov and Boshirov had been flying all over Europe and the Middle East in recent years. Amsterdam, Vienna, Tel Aviv, for sports nutritionists in Russia they seemed to have a lot of spare time and money. They must be very successful sports nutritionists (!) but if that was the case you'd imagine there'd be at least some trace of them on the Internet.

But there wasn't. What further studies did find is a man called Alexander Yevgenyevich Mishkin (on a database in St Petersburg) who'd been born on the same day (13th July 1979) as 'Petrov' and whose passport had a very strong facial match with Petrov's passport. Mishkin had also registered his car in an area of Moscow closely linked with the Russian government.

When Bellingcat allies in Russia visited Mishkin's home village (a very remote and rural place, Loyga in Arkhangelsk Oblast, which can rarely be accessed by car and has one daily train) they found the locals very proud of him. They spoke of a Russian hero who had been given a medal by Vladimir Putin. The same Vladimir Putin who had said he had no knowledge of the man whatsoever.

'Boshirov' appeared to be Colonel Anatoliy Vladimirovich Chepiga. Again, Chepiga and Boshirov's date of birth (5th April 1979) matched and, again, so did the facial recognition software. Like Petrov/Mishkin, Boshirov/Chepiga was a 'Hero of Russia' and had been awarded a medal by Putin. He was also listed as a member of the Special Forces of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.

The GRU for short. A third suspect, Sergej Fedotov, came to light. Fedotov, a few years older than the other men, had moved to London a short time before Mishkin and Chepiga arrived and his passport also appeared to have been issued at almost exactly the same time.

Denis Sergeev, another GRU officer, appeared to be Fedotov's real name and he, even more so than the others, was quite a frequent flyer. He'd racked up more Air Miles than Alan Whicker but one journey was of particular interest to the staff at Bellingcat.

In 2015, Sergeev had been in Bulgaria when arms dealer Emilian Gebrev fell ill. The Bulgarian authorities had dismissed his condition as no more than food poisoning but chemicals found in Gebrev's blood indicated a nerve agent had been used.

It looked like an assassination attempt and when Gebrev was poisoned again a couple of months later there seemed to be little doubt. Coincidentally or not, you decide, associates of Sergeev just happened to be enjoying another trip to Bulgaria at the time of the second poisoning.

Sergeev and his GRU buddies do seem to get around and wherever they go it seems they never forget to pack some Novichok. Officially, the Russian Novichok programme was shut down in accordance with the Chemical Weapons Convention (to which every country in the world, bar North Korea, Egypt, and South Sudan are signed up) but, of course, it wasn't.

The Russians just moved the factory that was making it and pretended it was a making .... sports nutrition (suggesting that the claims that the Skripal suspects worked in sports nutrition was both an in joke and a fuck you of international proportions).

Sergeev's GRU team have been found by Bellingcat to have followed the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist at least forty times in recent years. Navalny, famously, has been poisoned at least twice and phone records have been uncovered of a spy boasting (to Navalny himself, posing as a colleague) that he'd put the Novichok on the fly of Navalny's pants.

They actually poisoned his cock. Navalny is still alive - just. He's in prison in Moscow for not meeting his parole obligations (due to being in a coma in a hospital in Berlin after being poisoned) and he has complained of losing feeling in his hands, legs, and spine and of being deprived of sleep and has suffered two spinal disc herniations.

Amnesty International have described Navalny's prison conditions as torture and have suggested they believe the Russian state may be, intentionally, slowly killing him. Higgins, too, feared for Navalny's life. The prognosis for Navalny doesn't look good. Many other individuals, from minor opposition figures to local activists, have already been poisoned and killed by the GRU and the FSB (the modern equivalent of the KGB) and Bellingcat are investigating yet more chemical weapons attacks and assassination attempts carried out by the Russian state.

Bellingcat doubt, as do any reasonable observers, that the ones they know about are all of them and that they certainly won't be the last. Poisoning, or assassinating in other ways, their enemies is working for the FSB, it's working for Russia, and it's working for Putin. So why would they stop?

We can expel a diplomat here and there and Putin won't care and even the expelled diplomat will fall straight into another, probably better, job. The West is too weak in its dealings with Putin and Putin knows that. While nobody is saying it's time to bomb Russia, Eliot Higgins and others are saying it's time to at least hit them where it hurts. Financially. Otherwise the assassinations will continue and, most likely, become ever more bolder and even more brazen. Russians aren't bad people but under a bad leader, Putin, Russia has become a threat to the entire planet.