It's too soon to conclude whether former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia are Moscow's latest overseas victims. U.K. authorities are continuing their investigation into their recent nerve-agent poisoning, while health officials treat nearly 20 others "in connection" with the incident. Regardless, the West must confront President Vladimir Putin on how Russia has used murder as a tool of statecraft.
Consider the context. The Skripal incident, in which father and daughter were found unconscious on a park bench after in shopping trip on March 4 in Salisbury (about 90 miles west of London), echoes the 2006 poisoning with radioactive polonium of Alexander Litvinenko, another former spy living in Britain.
Russian state assassinations are allegedly not limited to Britain. In 2009, Dubai authorities said the killing of former Chechen general Sulim Yamadayev was planned by a member of Russian parliament.
Russia's campaign against Putin's foes is a particular problem for the U.K., where many of the president's allies prefer to hide their money and where expatriates once believed they could live without fear of Russian assassins. (Skripal had been sent to the U.K. in a prisoner exchange involving the Russian spy Anna Chapman, which by Cold War rules would have made his life secure.)
Last year, a Buzzfeed investigation revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies have identified 14 murders in the U.K. linked to Russia. The victims include former financier turned whistle-blower Alexander Perepilichnyy and medical doctor Matthew Puncher, who helped authorities investigate the murder of Litvinenko.
In all of these cases, Buzzfeed reported, U.S. spy agencies provided their British counterparts with intelligence that implicated Russian security services or the Russian mafia. But the official investigations never went there. Puncher, who was found dead after multiple stab wounds, was ruled a suicide.
Even in the case of Litvinenko, the public reckoning was slow-rolled and watered down. The British inquiry into his killing took 10 years. In the end, Interpol notices were issued against two FSB agents, but not the former head of that agency, Nikolai Patrushev, who was implicated in the final report by its lead judge Sir Robert Owen.
This fits a larger pattern, according to David Satter, an American historian and journalist who has meticulously documented the Russian government's role in the 1999 apartment bombings that helped bring Putin to power a year later. "We historically have ignored Russia's hand in these things," he told me. "We have always accepted their absurd explanations. We tacitly accept this by not doing anything."
The good news is that the Skripal incident could be a turning point. Conservative Member of Parliament Nick Boles captured an element of British opinion when he tweeted: "I do not see how we can maintain diplomatic relations with a country that tries to murder people on British soil and puts the lives of British citizens at risk."
The U.S. and the U.K. cannot and should not respond to Russian state-sponsored murder in kind. Just as it would make little sense for the U.S. to meddle in this month's heavily rigged Russian presidential election as payback for the Russian hacks and trolls in 2016, it would be a mistake for Western spy services to get back into the practice of political assassinations.
Now would be a good time to re-open the closed cases reported last year by Buzzfeed. As Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary for defense under President Barack Obama, said recently: "We need to be calling them out publicly, mincing no words and clearly stating the Kremlin is responsible, if that's where the facts lead."
Along these lines, the U.S. intelligence agencies should begin thinking through declassifying some of the intelligence it has that links Putin to these overseas killings. John Sipher, a former career CIA officer who specialized in Russia, said American evidence in this respect is damning. "You can assume that the U.S. intelligence community has accumulated an amazing amount of stolen information that would be very embarrassing to the Russian leadership over the years," he said.
It's true that President Donald Trump has slobbered over Putin. At the same time, his government has been surprisingly tough with Moscow. If the Trump administration is willing to sell anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, it's reasonable to think it would publicize information on Russian assassinations.
Naming and shaming Russian killers gnaws away at a key objective of Russian foreign policy, which is to be recognized and respected as a great power. Disclosing intercepts, documents and other evidence of Russian criminality exposes it as a sponsor of terror. And it makes Russia more toxic for banks and corporations.
The second line of action for the West should be an effort to either reform or replace Interpol, which has coordinated international police efforts since 1923. Russia has proved to be a serial abuser of the Interpol system, which is supposed to share information on wanted criminals across jurisdictions for the purposes of extradition. Russia uses Interpol to harass its political opponents, like issuing red notices for William Browder, the hedge-fund manager who has made it his life's work to sanction those Russian nationals responsible for the death of his former lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.
This requires two steps. First, Western countries should make it clear to Interpol that it either creates a separate tier for Russia and other countries who abuse the system, where they must provide a higher burden of proof, or it should form a parallel agency to Interpol for civilized nations. Second, it should be issuing more international arrest warrants for Russian officials implicated in assassinations abroad.
And U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May and other European leaders must inform Putin directly of the consequences his regime will face if it continues its assassinations on European soil. This should include designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.
Editorial on 03/18/2018