A blundering Boris Johnson doesn't help, and neither does a Labour opposition keen to help Putin out and sow doubt, but of course Russia was responsible for the Salisbury attack. We know that, the Russians know that, everybody knows that - apart perhaps from Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott. It's part of the Russian game to gloat and spread disinformation.
David Aaronovitch in the Times (£) - Useful idiots are letting Putin off the hook - Corbynistas and others in the West who raise doubts about the Salisbury poisoning are not living in the real world:
Keep your eye on that ball: that someone thought it was OK to try to assassinate a British resident on British soil using a nerve agent. It’s the only ball that counts. According to Professor Sergei Karaganov, also speaking on the BBC yesterday, that dark someone was more likely to be British or “British friends, wanting a crisis”. Perhaps he meant the EU; Russians don’t like the EU. This Professor Karaganov is not just anyone. He is almost the Henry Kissinger of modern Russia — a top academic, a valued adviser, a prolific writer and thinker. So hearing this absurd conspiracy nonsense from him was a bit like listening to, say, the estimable historian Sir Ian Kershaw arguing that 9/11 was an inside job. Karaganov couldn’t possibly have believed it, but he said it anyway.
For various reasons there are all too many people in the West who will be diverted or want to divert others on the matter of Russian culpability. There are pacifists who dread a nuclear war, anti-imperialists for whom the West is the world’s greatest enemy, business interests (like that German politician tweeter) who fear the effects of bad relations with Russia, and mistaken oppositionists who blame their own government for everything and trust it on nothing.
They all need to understand something. Russia is not playing their game. Russia’s policy is to pursue its own interests ruthlessly and to use the West’s self-doubts and self-criticism against it. When Russia commits an atrocity or makes a bloody mistake, it drags the issue out, delays an inquiry and peppers the atmosphere with conspiracist chaff. So the grass now grows long over the 298 occupants of the Malaysian airliner shot down by a Russian ground-to-air missile system deployed by pro-Russian separatists in the summer of 2014.
Professor Karaganov may endorse propagandistic nonsense but he is not stupid. In an essay last year entitled The Victory of Russia and the New Concert of Nations he wrote that back in 2014 he had re-read War and Peace “and I was struck by one phrase which I had somehow overlooked before: ‘A battle is won by those who are firmly resolved to win it.’ I understood that Russia was resolved and would win.”
Today, looking at how easily we in the West can be diverted from any resolution of our own, it’s depressingly hard to disagree.
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