On Monday, March 4, the one-year anniversary of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, Russian state-broadcaster RT published an article in its “news” section seeking to deny the Kremlin’s hand in the nerve agent attack on the former Russian spy and his daughter.
Writing in its informal style, RT ironically referred to the crowd-funded investigative website Bellingcat as “sleuths” and “detectives” for the journalists role in identifying the Russian military intelligence agents who are accused of carrying out the Salisbury, England attack.
RT wrote that “the intrepid Atlantic Council-backed ‘open-source’ sleuths at Bellingcat pounced on the case, finding two Russians who were in Salisbury on March 4, naming them as suspects and accusing them of being GRU (Rusian military intelligence).”
RT said the suspects, operating under the aliases Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, claimed to be “just friends, civilians, tourists who went to Salisbury to visit the famous cathedral.” It dismissed that the two could have carried out the attack because it was seemingly botched.
That skepticism apparently is based on a statement by former Scotland Yard detective Charles Shoebridge, who the suspects had left “what seems to be a very reckless and clear trail of evidence, which almost seems to be designed, or at least would almost inevitably lead to the conclusions that the police and the authorities have come to today … So many mistakes were made, if indeed they were mistakes."
Shoebridge is seen often on RT. His comments, in this instance, included no new factual information.
In its March 4 piece, RT wrote: “The at Bellingcat were not satisfied with Petrov and Boshirov. They set out to prove the men were actually super-secret Russian spies.” It added that Bellingcat found that Boshirov “was really highly decorated commando Colonel Anatoly Chepiga, and Petrov a distinguished military physician .”
Despite RT’s use of sarcasm in its attempt to undermine Bellingcat’s credibility, its anniversary article does not offer new evidence – even misstating the timeline of the investigation. RT appears to credit Bellingcat for “naming them as suspects and accusing them of being GRU.”
However in early September, nine days before Bellingcat’s documenting peculiarities in the duo’s passports and background, police in the UK identified Petrov and Boshirov. On that same day, British Prime Minister Theresa May the House of Commons the men were Russian agents.
Following a late September Bellingcat article that identified Chepiga, who grew up in a small village near Russia’s border with China, the accused agent was identified by local residents.
One woman the Russian daily Kommersant that Chepiga served in “the secret service” in various “hot spots” after graduating from a military academy. Another : "I know where his parents used to live, that he was a military man. An officer. He fought in war zones, then he was in Moscow.”
She added: "It's him in the photos, of course."
Former neighbors also confirmed that Petrov was in fact Mishkin.
Yevgeny Sergeyevich, who grew up in Miskhin’s home village of Loyga, : “He [Mishkin] became a Hero of Russia three or four years ago. I heard about it from acquaintances in Loyga who are still in touch with him.”
At the Far Eastern Military Academy where Chepiga was enrolled, Radio Liberty his portrait among those who had received the Hero of the Russian Federation award.
Meanwhile, CCTV footage placed Chepiga and Mishkin on Wilton Road near the Skripals’ home in Salisbury the day before the military-grade nerve agent Novichok was sprayed on the victims’ door.
The police timeline had the suspects returning to Moscow on the same day the Skripals were poisoned.
by the Guardian, Chepiga and Mishkin’s Salisbury trip account, in the September 2018 RT broadcast, does not “add up.”
Ironically, the RT piece says “there has been no shortage of often fanciful theories emanating from UK officialdom and NATO-backed ‘open-source detectives’ such as Bellingcat, but none have taken the world closer to knowing what actually happened.”
Just weeks after the attack, that the official Russian narrative was changing on a near daily basis.
Kings College London, last week, that said Russian state media had published 138 narratives regarding the alleged Novichok attack, which the Russian Embassy in the UK characterized as “separate points on various aspects of the incident” rather than separate “accounts” or “versions.”