By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 11/10/24

Russian businesses are bracing themselves for a financial crunch that could put many of them out of business. The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) interest rate has reached a crushing 21%, with expectations for a further hike in December, and over the last two years companies have built up significant commercial debt with floating rate interest payments.

The CBR has progressively raised rates since the second quarter of 2023 in a bid to control persistent inflation and support the faltering ruble. However, the soaring cost of borrowing is now pushing many companies towards a dangerous debt spiral, with interest payments consuming one out of every four rubles they earn.

Late payments from customers and partners have been climbing, signalling distress in the corporate sector as firms struggle to service debt under such high rates. With real interest rates, once bank premiums are factored in, effectively reaching 25% for businesses, the likelihood of defaults and bankruptcies has risen sharply, Meduza reports.

Before the war only around 20% of corporate loans were issued at floating rates. By mid-2023, however, that share had surged to 44%, as businesses took out loans with terms pegged to the CBR’s key rate. Many firms, driven by the need for capital to support import substitution after the imposition of sanctions and to acquire assets as foreign companies left Russia, borrowed heavily – and under the assumption that interest rates would eventually stabilise or decrease.

That didn’t happen. Heavy government spending overheated the economy and sent inflation soaring. The CBR began an aggressive rate-hike tightening cycle that has ended yet.

By late 2024, floating-rate loans constituted 53% of corporate borrowing. This surge, combined with the weakened ruble and heightened government spending, drove up inflation, fuelling further rate hikes.

The demand for loans has also soared as businesses race to lock in capital ahead of anticipated new restrictions. Tightened reserve requirements and stricter lending standards are expected to come into force by year-end, leading companies to expand their loan portfolios by 22% in the past year alone.

The situation will only get worse. Building up debt is not a problem while the economy was growing, turning in a surprise 3.6% expansion in 2023, but as bne IntelliNews reported, Russia’s economy is cooling and a sharp slowdown is expected in 2025 that will only increase the pressure on corporations further. The prospects for the CBR to switch to easing monetary policy remains remote as long as the war in Ukraine continues.

Corporate bankruptcies in Russia have jumped by 20% this year, as soaring interest rates and liquidity shortages push firms closer to financial ruin, according to data from the Unified Federal Registry of Bankruptcy Declarations (Fedresurs), Meduza reports.

The uptick in insolvencies, though initially concentrated in the first quarter, is poised to accelerate as tighter monetary conditions make debt servicing increasingly unsustainable.

Signs of distress have intensified in recent months, with the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP) reporting a substantial rise in complaints over late payments.

“Previously, 22% of business owners faced this issue, but that figure has now jumped to 37%,” said the union as cited by Meduza. The RSPP attributes the escalation to the difficulty of assessing working capital loans, a situation forcing many companies to delay payments to suppliers and other creditors.

The retail sector is especially vulnerable. Russia’s Union of Shopping Centres has petitioned the government for critical relief measures, including subsidised interest rates of 7-10%, debt restructuring, and payment deferrals of five to 10 years, reports Kommersant. Without such interventions, the union warns, 200 shopping centres could face bankruptcy within the coming months. Similarly, office and warehouse owners are attempting to renegotiate terms with creditors.

Officials are increasingly sounding the alarm bell. Sergey Chemezov, CEO of the state-owned defence conglomerate Rostec, warned that the current lending environment is untenable for manufacturers whose production cycles exceed a year.

“If we keep operating like this, most of our businesses will go bankrupt,” Chemezov said in October, adding that even high-revenue arms sales are insufficient to offset debt costs at rates exceeding 20%.

“If a product’s manufacturing cycle takes a year, advance payments cover only 40% of production costs. The rest must be borrowed, but high interest rates wipe out all profits,” he added.

Red lights are also flashing in the corporate bond market, where high rates are making bonds unaffordable as a source of capital. A key risk measure, the net debt-to-EBITDA ratio, has surged among lower-tier firms, with Gazprombank estimating this metric now exceeds three. While previously manageable, this debt-to-earnings ratio has become perilous under today’s interest rates, which is already forcing some companies to spend three out of four rules they earn to servicing debt.

The high rates have also made rolling maturing bonds over untenable, putting even more pressure on corporate reserves as management had not planned to retire their debt at this stage and assumed that bonds could be refinanced. To refinance maturing bonds, companies are now forced to offer yields around 27% to attract investors wary of default risks, according to credit rating agency Expert RA, as cited by Meduza.

Industries on the frontlines include paper and wood processing, wholesale trade, and agriculture. Russia’s coal industry is already in crisis after EU markets were closed by sanctions. The construction sector, particularly vulnerable to delayed payments, has been hit by a double whammy after a generous mortgage subsidy programme was ended on July 1, sending the cost of borrowing for would-be home owners upwards. Mortgage loan applications halved in July alone as Russia’s real estate market was rocked by the decision.

Real estate companies have responded by offering their own financing programmes, similar to the subprime model used in the US that caused the 2008 global financial crisis. Borrowers can take out cheap loans with rates well below the regulator’s prime rate for a fixed period of a few years, but the rates will rise to match the prime rate after the honeymoon period is over. It’s a bet that the CBR will reverse its monetary policy in a few years – in other words it’s a bet that the war in Ukraine will stop soon – and rates will fall again. But if that doesn’t happen, Russia will face a major housing-induced financial crisis.

Retail loans have also been hit by a double whammy as the CBR attempted to cool mushrooming consumer borrowing that was adding to inflation as part of its non-monetary policy methods to cool the economy and bring inflation down. The United Credit Bureau has reported a notable decline in average credit scores across Russia. By October 2024, the likelihood of default among consumers had risen by 12% compared to the previous year, and long-term overdue payments are becoming more prevalent. That is worrying the regulator, which reports a build up in the concentrations of debt that could precipitate a financial crisis.

Historically, corporate bankruptcies and bond defaults tend to surge three to six months after rate hikes, reports Meduza, a trend that could manifest before year-end as companies face imminent bond repayments. Many corporate bonds mature in the fourth quarter of this year, and with investor sentiment fragile, refinancing options remain costly and elusive.

Oligarch Alexey Mordashov, the founder of steel mill Severstal, put it this way: “At the current interest rate, it’s more profitable for companies to halt expansion or even downsize and put funds in the bank rather than continue operations and take on the associated risks,” Meduza reports.

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 11/21/24

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday that a controversial US missile defense base in Poland is a potential target of the Russian military, comments that come amid soaring tensions as the US just authorized Ukraine to strike Russian territory with long-range NATO missiles.

“Given the level of threats posed by such Western military facilities, the missile defense base in Poland has long been included among the priority targets for potential neutralization. If necessary, this can be achieved using a wide range of advanced weaponry,” Zakharova said.

The Aegis Ashore anti-ballistic missile system in Poland has long been a security concern for Russia as its Mark-41 launchers are capable of fitting nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles, which have a range of about 1,000 miles. A land-based version of the Tomahawks was previously banned by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which the US withdrew from in 2019.

The US just recently opened the Aegis Ashore base in Poland, and NATO formally took control of it on Thursday. “The integration of the Aegis Ashore system into NATO’s defensive network underscores our collective commitment to ensuring the security of all Allies,” US Air Force Gen. James Hecker, the head of NATO’s Allied Air Command, said at a ceremony formalizing NATO control of the base.

Zakharova said the establishment of the base follows “a series of deeply destabilizing actions by the Americans and their North Atlantic allies in the strategic sphere” and said the move “aligns with the longstanding and destructive practice of advancing NATO’s military infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders.”

Her warning that Russia could potentially target the base comes after Russia updated its nuclear doctrine in response to the US supporting long-range Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory. Under the new doctrine, Russia now considers an attack by a non-nuclear armed state that’s supported by a nuclear-armed power as a joint attack.

Russian President Vladimir Putin also said on Thursday that Russia has the right to strike the military facilities of countries that are supplying Ukraine with the missiles. “We believe that we have the right to use our weapons against the military facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities,” he said.

Intellinews, 11/20/24

The Kremlin is ready to start ceasefire talks and is willing to make some “limited” territorial concessions, Reuters’ Moscow bureau chief Guy Faulconbridge reported on November 20, citing five senior current and former Kremlin sources.

Moscow is ready to start talks after Donald Trump is sworn in as the next US president in January, according to the sources cited by Reuters. Russia is also reportedly willing to freeze the conflict along the current front line and cede a limited amount of occupied territory but is demanding in exchange significant Ukrainian concessions.

Russia’s proposed terms for negotiations are based on the failed 2022 Istanbul peace deal. Ukraine’s presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych, who led the Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul, confirmed that a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine was agreed in principle in March 2022 and said all the points were initialled. He said his team opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy rejected the deal days later. Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who participated in the Istanbul talks, listed the conditions in an interview with Berliner Zeitung on October last year:

-Ukraine would abandon its Nato aspirations;

-The bans on the Russian language in Ukraine would be removed;

-Donbas would remain in Ukraine but as an autonomous region (Schroeder: “Like South Tyrol”);

-The United Nations Security Council plus Germany should offer and supervise the security agreements; and

-The Crimea problem would be addressed, but by future generations.

Top of the list is that Ukraine renounces its aspirations to join Nato and return to its pre-2014 stance of constitutionally enshrined neutrality. The Kremlin has made it explicitly clear since the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued an eight-point list of demands in December 2021 that any and all negotiations start with an “iron-clad legally binding” guarantee that Ukraine will never join Nato.

Moscow has also returned to its demands that Ukraine dramatically reduce the size of its army – a hotly debated point in the Istanbul deal, but one that was eventually agreed to in principle.

Moscow is also insisting that laws constricting the use of the Russian language be dropped and that Russian be made an official language. In Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent Valdai speech outlining his multipolar world view he repeated concerns for the rights of ethnic Russians that were caught in other countries following the fall of the Soviet Union and the issue of language rights has always played an important role in those concerns.

Additionally, Moscow insists on security guarantees for Ukraine that also cover Russia and will avoid future direct conflicts between Russia and the West in the future.

In the run-up to the Istanbul talks, Ukraine already conceded it was willing to give up its Nato aspirations during the initial peace negotiations in Belarus in March 2022, if it received bilateral security guarantees from its Western allies. Those hopes were dashed during the famous meeting between Zelenskiy and former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in April, who told the Ukrainian leader that the West would not provide Ukraine with security deals, and to “fight on.”

Since then Ukraine has signed a series of “security assurances” with European allies, but these all stop short of Western allies coming to Ukraine’s military assistance should it be attacked by Russia again.

These assurances fall short of what Ukraine would like to see and Zelenskiy has been pushing hard for accelerated accession to Nato to provide real security guarantees as part of his victory plan.

More recently, backed into a corner by Trump’s threat to bring the war to an end “in 24 hours” and in anticipation of evaporating military and financial support from Ukraine’s Western backers, Zelenskiy has switched his rhetoric from victory to “resistance”.

Territorial concessions

Putin appears more willing to make concessions to get a deal than most commentators believe, according to the Reuters report, as the officials interviewed suggest that the Kremlin will concede some territory as part of the talks.

While Putin has publicly said that any deal will have to take account of the “territorial realities on the ground” – widely assumed to mean Russia intends to keep the territory it has occupied – Reuters interlocutors suggest that there is actually some wiggle room.

Moscow might relinquish control over small areas of the Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions. There is also “room for discussion” on the status of four regions it annexed last year – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – declared part of Russia in 2022. Previously, Putin has said publicly that Kyiv must recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions, despite the fact that the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) do not fully control any of them.

However, the Kremlin has made it crystal clear that it is not prepared to discuss returning the Crimea and the officials interviewed by Reuters did not mention the status of the land bridge that connects the Crimea to the Russian border at Rostov-on-Don, which presumably will also remain under Russian control.

Russia ready to stop the war

The very first ceasefire talks began on February 28, 2022, at a time when Russian forces had seized swaths of territory in the south, east and north of Ukraine, where they had advanced close to Kyiv after pouring across the border from Russia and Belarus.

The draft – titled “Treaty on the Resolution of the situation in Ukraine and the Neutrality of Ukraine” – is dated March 7, 2022, a week after Russia launched the invasion.

Putin has been hoping to improve his relations with the West for a long time but has been repeatedly disappointed. There was a brief glimmer of hope after Biden took office in 2021, when he met with Putin in Geneva and rushed through a renewal of the START III missile treaty – the first Cold War arms control treaty to be renewed since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russian side immediately called for work to be started on renewing the lapsed Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), another Cold War arms control deal, but those talks never began as tensions escalated rapidly.

Russia has had the upper hand in the Ukraine war since the fall of Avdiivka on February 17 and time is on Putin’s side in any negotiations, but the Kremlin is slowly coming under more pressure to halt the war and start repairing the damage to its military and economy.

Heavy military spending has sent inflation skyrocketing, which the CBR has been unable to reign in. Russia’s economy is cooling and set for a sharp slowdown in 2025, according to a pessimistic medium-term macroeconomic outlook issued by the regulator at the start of August. Record-high borrowing costs could spark a wave of bankruptcies in the new year, although others have argued that Russia’s economy is more robust than it first appears.

The Kremlin has been signalling since the summer that it is ready to stop and Ukraine had also been inching towards a ceasefire agreement as it began to run out of men, money and weapons. A preliminary first round of talks on halting Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure had been scheduled to happen in Qatar in August, but that meeting was called off after the Kursk incursion.

Zelenskiy has also said that he wants the war to finish this year as Ukraine’s position becomes increasingly dire, but he has backed himself into a corner with his maximalist demands on a complete Russian withdrawal to the 1991 borders.

While Russia is currently producing more arms than all of the EU combined, it is still digging deeply into its Soviet-era stockpile and needs to start rebuilding its military, making it increasingly vulnerable to a Nato attack. Experts estimate that it will already take decades just to get back to where the military was at the start of 2022.

Security deals

Russia has long called for a new pan-European security deal and a new European security infrastructure that reflects the post-Cold War realities that would move beyond Nato, which was specifically designed to threaten the Soviet Union.

Putin first warned that Russia would “push back” if Nato kept expanding in his famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, but was widely ignored by the West.

In his first act as president, Dmitry Medvedev travelled to Brussels in 2008 and offered a Russian draft pan-European security deal, but it was rejected out of hand. Tensions escalated from there and Russian started to modernise its army in 2012 in preparation for WWIII; this was complete by 2021 when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was ready to throw down the gauntlet with his “new rules of the game” speech. The war in Ukraine started a year later when his challenge went unanswered. Lavrov then lambasted the West in his “Empire of Lies” speech a year later, detailing all of Russia’s complaints with the West.

Military size

Russia has already shown it is willing to make some concessions in Istanbul to bring about peace, although the longer the conflict goes on the less those concessions will be, most experts agree.

During the Istanbul ceasefire talks in March 2022, reports indicated that the Russian side was pushing for Ukraine to significantly reduce the size of its military.

Russian negotiators were reportedly demanding that Ukraine limit its armed forces to around 50,000 to 60,000 troops from the 200,000 active military personnel serving before the war. At the same time, the Russian delegation demanded a cap on the Ukrainian tank force to no more than 100 to 150 tanks from the estimated 800 to 900 tanks Ukraine had before the Russian invasion. Similarly, the Russian side reportedly wanted to limit Ukraine’s air force to a few dozen planes, potentially capping it at 50 aircraft or fewer, vs the approximately 125 combat-capable aircraft in the Ukrainian pre-war air force, and a ban on developing or deploying missiles with a range of over 250 km. Moscow also wanted to be able to prohibit other types of weapons in the future.

However, subsequent reports claim that the Russian side made concessions on the military size issue, but in the end the Ukrainian side agreed to a substantial reduction in its armed forces. Of the various plans being discussed since Trump’s election victory, many of them include substantially beefing up Ukraine’s military, which will be a non-starter for the Kremlin should talks happen.

Reuters, 11/21/24

• Summary

• Putin says Russia fired hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile
• Putin says the Ukraine war taking on global character
• US official says Russia briefed them ahead of time
• Ukraine fired Western weapons into Russia this week
• Tensions rising in 33-month-old war

KYIV, Nov 21 (Reuters) – Russia fired a hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile at the city of Dnipro on Thursday in response to the U.S. and UK allowing Kyiv to strike Russian territory with advanced Western weapons, in a further escalation of the 33-month-old war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a televised address, said Moscow struck a Ukrainian military facility with a new ballistic missile known as “Oreshnik” (the hazel) and warned that more could follow.

“A regional conflict in Ukraine previously provoked by the West has acquired elements of a global character,” Putin said in an address to the nation carried by state television after 8 pm Moscow time (1700 GMT).

A U.S. official said that Washington was pre-notified by Russia shortly before its strike, while another said they had briefed Kyiv and other close allies in recent days to prepare for the possible use of such a weapon.

Earlier on Thursday, Kyiv said that Russia had fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM ), a weapon designed for long-distance nuclear strikes and never before used in war, though U.S. officials said it was an intermediate range ballistic missile that has a smaller range.

Regardless of its classification, the latest strike highlighted rapidly rising tensions in the past several days.

Ukraine fired U.S. and British missiles at targets inside Russia this week despite warnings by Moscow that it would see such action as a major escalation.

“Today there was a new Russian missile. All the characteristics – speed, altitude – are (of an) intercontinental ballistic (missile). An expert (investigation) is currently underway,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video statement.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry urged the international community to react swiftly to the use of what it said was “the use by Russia of a new type of weaponry.”

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russia likely possesses a handful of the “experimental” intermediate-range ballistic missiles used in Thursday’s strike.

Ukraine’s air force said the missile targeted Dnipro in central-eastern Ukraine and was fired from the Russian region of Astrakhan, more than 700 km (435 miles) away. It did not specify what kind of warhead the missile had or what type of missile it was. There was no suggestion it was nuclear-armed.

Intermediate-range ballistic missiles have a range of 3,000–5,500 km (1,860-3,415 miles)

“Whether it was an ICBM or an IRBM, the range isn’t the important factor,” said Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral research fellow at Oslo university who specializes in missile technology and nuclear strategy.

“The fact that it carried a MIRVed (Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle) payload is much more significant for signaling purposes and is the reason Russia opted for it. This payload is exclusively associated with nuclear-capable missiles.”

Russia also fired a Kinzhal hypersonic missile and seven Kh-101 cruise missiles, six of which were shot down, the Ukrainian air force said.

The attack targeted enterprises and critical infrastructure in Dnipro, the air force said. Dnipro was a missile-making centre in the Soviet era. Ukraine has expanded its military industry during the war, but keeps its whereabouts secret.

The air force did not say what the missile targeted or whether it had caused any damage, but regional governor Serhiy Lysak said the missile attack damaged an industrial enterprise and set off fires in Dnipro. Two people were hurt.

Ukrainska Pravda, a Kyiv-based media outlet, had cited anonymous sources saying the missile was an RS-26 Rubezh, a solid-fuelled intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 5,800 km, according to the Arms Control Association.

‘TOTALLY UNPRECEDENTED’

A group of glowing projectiles could be seen plummeting to the ground from the night sky in a video published by Come Back Alive, a Ukrainian military charity. It said the video was of Dnipro overnight.

The NATO military alliance did not respond to a request for comment. The U.S. European Command said it had nothing on the reported use of an ICBM and referred questions to the U.S. Department of Defense.

Some military experts said the missile launch, if confirmed, could be seen as an act of deterrence by Moscow following Kyiv’s strikes into Russia with Western weapons this week, after restrictions on such strikes were lifted.

Russian war correspondents on Telegram and an official speaking on condition of anonymity said Kyiv fired British Storm Shadow cruise missiles into Russia’s Kursk region bordering Ukraine on Wednesday.

Russia’s defence ministry, in its daily report of events over the previous 24 hours on Thursday, said air defences had shot down two British Storm Shadow cruise missiles but did not say where. Britain had previously let Ukraine use Storm Shadows only within Ukrainian territory.

Ukraine also fired U.S. ATACMS missiles into Russia on Tuesday after U.S. President Joe Biden gave the all-clear to use such missiles in this way, two months before he leaves office and Donald Trump returns to the White House. Putin on Tuesday lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks.

Trump has said he will end the war, without saying how, and has criticised billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine under Biden. The warring sides believe Trump is likely to push for peace talks – not known to have been held since the war’s earliest months – and are trying to attain strong positions before negotiations.

Moscow has said the use of Western weapons to strike Russian territory far from the border would be a major escalation in the conflict. Kyiv says it needs the capability to defend itself by hitting Russian rear bases used to support Moscow’s February 2022 invasion.

***

Video of Putin’s Comments on the strike:

WATCH FULL: Putin’s address to the nation after long-range Western weapons used against Russia pic.twitter.com/PGxcbXwckn

— RT (@RT_com) November 21, 2024

Twitter link here.

Video footage and report from Hindustan Times:

YouTube video here.

By Paul Sutton, Free Press Backlash, 10/17/24

The much belated public inquiry into Dawn Sturgess’ supposed death from Novichok poisoning is now in progress. It’s claimed she was randomly and inadvertently killed in the Skripal affair. I’d anyway have been interested but I’m in truth fascinated, as I was brought up in Salisbury and my father was director of the nearby Public Health Laboratory Service lab at Porton Down.

This is the Wikipedia account of how Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were supposedly attacked by Russian assassins:

“On Sunday 4th March 2018, Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia, who was visiting from Moscow, were found “slipping in and out of consciousness on a public bench “near a shopping centre in Salisbury by a doctor and nurse who were passing by. While at Salisbury District Hospital, they were put into induced comas to prevent organ damage.

“Following the incident, health authorities checked 21 members of the emergency services and the public for symptoms. Two police officers were treated for possible minor symptoms, said to be itchy eyes and wheezing, while a third, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who had been sent to Sergei Skripal’s house, was in a serious condition. By 22nd March 2018, Detective Sergeant Bailey had recovered enough to be discharged from the hospital, and by 15 January 2019, he returned to active duty.

“The police declared a major incident as a number of agencies were involved. On 6th March, it was agreed under the National Counter Terrorism Policing Network that the Counter Terrorism Command based within the Metropolitan Police would take over the investigation from Wiltshire Police. Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, head of Counter Terrorism Policing, appealed for witnesses to the incident following a COBR meeting chaired by Home Secretary Amber Rudd.

“On 12th March 2018, Prime Minister Theresa May identified the nerve agent used in the attack as a Russian-developed nerve agent Novichok and demanded explanation from the Russian government. Two days later, May said that Russia was responsible for the incident and announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats in retaliation.

“On 30th June 2018, two British Nationals were hospitalized by chemical poisoning in Amesbury, 8 miles (13 km) from Salisbury where Skripal had been attacked. One victim died in the hospital. Police determined they were poisoned by the same Novichok nerve agent used to attempt to assassinate Sergei and his daughter, and Home Secretary Sajid Javid told the House of Commons that the victims had likely been poisoned by the improperly discarded nerve agent used to attack Sergei.

“On 7th June 2020, The Sunday Times reported that Sergei and his daughter had been settled in New Zealand under new identities. A few weeks later, the New Zealand Herald raised several doubts about the report.”

The story is so absurd as to seem an elaborate joke, designed for some other purpose. The Russian agents supposedly responsible stayed in a grotty east London hotel (where they used hookers and bought drugs) then travelled down to Salisbury on Saturday 3rd March, to survey the scene. A light fall of snow sent them scurrying back to east London, Russians being unused to snow. Obviously they’d stayed in east London to ensure a lengthy and inconvenient repeat trip to Salisbury, with plenty of CCTV to spot them on the way.

Mindful of this, they returned on Sunday 4th and smeared nerve agent on Sergei’s front door handle, then sauntered into Salisbury down the Wilton Road and Fisherton Street, looking in shop windows and ensuring they’d again be spotted. They walked past the station and a London train, to spend time strolling around the city as tourists. Having spare Novichok in a perfume bottle (now miraculously sealed and in a box that was also cellophane wrapped) they dumped it in a charity shop collection bin. Weeks later, it was picked up by junkie Charlie Rowley and given to his unlucky girlfriend Dawn Sturgess as a present. She used it as a spray and tragically died after being hospitalised.

What a crock. I’m not denying the truth somehow involves the Russians ‘tourists’, but wielding Novichok? When the Skripals were taken to Odstock, the initial notes had fentanyl poisoning on them. Interestingly, Skripal senior’s arrival in Salisbury seems to have coincided with a spike in local fentanyl deaths.

I think the Novichok on the door handle theory is too absurd to need much discussion. If this was the intended assassination method, why? The arguments given are that Putin’s regime weren’t worried about killing thousands. Whilst Russia is clearly a rogue state they presumably don’t do things which make no sense. With the 2018 World Cup weeks away, would they really launch an indiscriminate nerve-agent attack rather than just shooting or stabbing the chap?

No sample taken from a patient was ever identified specifically as Novichok. The Chemical Defence Establishment (CDE) at Porton could only state that the substance was ‘of a type developed by Russia’. Samples provided to a Swiss lab by Porton were stated to have ‘almost a complete absence of impurities’. This was used as evidence that the Novichok was military grade and could only have been produced by a state. But it also signalled that the sample was fresh and couldn’t have been on someone’s door handle for days. Maybe it came from Porton’s own material. They must have had some, to identify the supposed sample as Russian in the first place.

No satisfactory answer has been given on how the Skripals were poisoned by their door handle but then fit enough to go to a pub, feed bread to some ducks (none of which were affected) eat a big lunch in Zizzi’s, then both be stricken and disabled at the same moment. They were different ages, genders and weights so that the dose needed wouldn’t be identical. In any case, the agent should have killed them after contact in less than a minute. As it was, the first person to discover the Skripals sitting on a bench was most fortunately the Chief Nurse of the British Army, Colonel A L McCourt, who was ‘just walking past’.

As for the less fortunate Amesbury junkies, Charlie Rowley’s home was urgently searched for Novichok. None was found until 11 days later, when police looked again and allegedly found it in a perfume bottle, sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter. Meanwhile, there was at least a four month delay in the police searching the crummy east London City Stay hotel; four months in which a cleaner might have fatally stumbled across more Novichok or a guest could have been contaminated. But maybe not, if the stuff was never there.

The BBC’s ‘Diplomatic Editor’ Mark Urban is a regular conduit for the security services. He fronted much of the BBC’s original coverage of the Skripal story. Yet he concealed from the viewers how he’d been in contact with Sergei Skripal for months before the alleged poisoning and had several meetings with him. Urban and Pablo Miller (Sergei’s British MI5 handler) were previously officers together in the Royal Tank Regiment.

Most likely, Rowley and Sturgess were used as a convenient couple of low-level addicts. She suffered a drug death and the security services piggy-backed their bizarre Novichok story onto them, to bolster public opinion which wasn’t buying the Skripal story. Rowley’s account changed but he supposedly settled on finding the perfume on rooting through the charity-shop collection bin. That it was still there more than a month after the Skripal event isn’t credible, since it was emptied regularly. How Rowley didn’t die, or how Sturgess didn’t die immediately, after both touching even a minute quantity is also not believable.

My approach is to focus on the most inexplicable part of the story. And that surely is the Russians travelling to Salisbury on successive days from an inconvenient location, to carry out an assassination. Why would they need any reconnaissance at all, for the door smearing?

But they weren’t there to kill him. The logical explanation is that they went back to London because they’d been told to. I think they’d met Sergei on Saturday but he’d sent them away, so they went back to London for discussion with their bosses about their next move. They’d no worries about CCTV; why would they attract attention? The mission was to get Sergei to work for the Russians again – possibly defect – and probably he already knew them. Perhaps they’d been working on this through his daughter, maybe coercion and threats to her were involved.

The Russians then returned on the Sunday and he agreed to meet them in a Salisbury pub, probably the Bishops Mill, very close to Zizzi’s (where he’d made a prior lunch reservation). This would explain why they wandered around unconcerned, supposedly after smearing his door; they’d done no such thing. Sergei was happier meeting them in a busy pub – was he worried about his British handlers seeing them visit his home or of the Russians getting violent?

Anyway, we’d got wind of the Skripals’ position and we sprayed them on the bench with some opiate, then got the pair up to Odstock. Our spooks were delighted to leave the two Russian agents thwarted, with no choice but returning empty handed and humiliated to Russia. Possibly our motivation was as much about punishing the Skripals as worrying about their defection, since spraying them on the bench would surely not have been our last chance to prevent it.

Or maybe – to be even more George Smiley – we’d always known about the Russian plan because we engineered it, setting a trap. Presumably without Skripal’s awareness but it could also work with him loyal to us and the pair never at any real risk from the spraying. But that’s a big stretch, since they seem to have been genuinely stricken.

Perhaps there were witnesses to them sitting on the bench, despite the prompt attentions of the Army nurse who’d been hovering. Hence the Novichok story from us. Or maybe that was always the intention; our whole purpose was that story, to humiliate Moscow. The policeman Nick Bailey, supposedly poisoned via the Skripal’s door, could have been Special Branch so that was also fake. Crucially, the absurdity of the ‘Novichock attack’ and the resulting world-wide condemnation would enrage the Russians and further isolate them internationally. Realistically, what could they do: admit they’d been trying to get Skripal back and had spectacularly failed?

This explains the half-arsed and embarrassed performance later of the two agents on Russian TV, posing without conviction as innocent tourists who’d visited England just to see Salisbury cathedral then been thwarted on their first visit by a snow shower. Maybe both sides rather enjoyed the stupidity of this story and played along, but the Russians had little choice.

As said, Dawn Sturgess’ was a druggy death – maybe fentanyl – accidental and unrelated to the Skripals, unless they were coincidentally also her suppliers. Whatever, it was used by our side to add veracity and generate public outrage. The nonsense story about the perfume bottle was fed to her boyfriend, who was reliably unreliable but looked after. The more confused he was the better.

And the Skripals? Possibly dead, since the excuse for not even seeing a video recording of them is flimsy. All the Salisbury inquest get are his supposed words, read from a paper copy. How on earth would their safety be compromised by a recording played but not put online? Then again, maybe the Russians do want them dead now, if all along they were working for us and playing them. It all depends on whether they were pawns or players.

I think if my explanation is true then we don’t come out of it too badly, but Salisbury has been treated appallingly. There never was any risk to public health and the publicity was terrible for tourism. Cynically, one could say that in the longer term it’s helped publicise the city.

My last visit was in 2022, for my mother’s funeral. In fact, we ate in Zizzi’s where the Skripals scoffed a hearty meal whilst supposedly poisoned by Novichok. I tried to chat about this with a waitress, who quickly summoned her manager. He was friendly and warned me not to talk about it publicly, but implied they’d not suffered any harm as a business.