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cover of episode The Salisbury Poisonings | The Journalist Who Knew Too Much | 4

The Salisbury Poisonings | The Journalist Who Knew Too Much | 4

2025/6/25
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British Scandal

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Alice Levine
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Luke Harding
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Matt Ford
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Matt Ford: 索尔兹伯里事件的核心是人道主义代价,包括无辜者丧生和受害者遭受的恐怖袭击。尽管事件令人震惊,但其中也存在荒谬之处,例如嫌疑人在电视上的表现和普京的虚假指控。我们与俄罗斯的关系至今仍非常重要,索尔兹伯里袭击事件是否成为了转折点值得深思。 Alice Levine: 卢克·哈丁曾亲身经历过普京政权,他对俄罗斯的报道经验丰富。 Luke Harding: 当我听到斯克里帕尔父女中毒的消息时,首先想到的是俄罗斯又一次采取了行动,其次是对自己不够了解情况感到沮丧。我对俄罗斯再次以如此明目张胆的方式采取行动感到惊讶,因为我曾写过关于利特维年科的书,并且与俄罗斯反对派人士关系密切。我对斯克里帕尔中毒事件感到沮丧,因为我本以为自己了解所有重要人物,但实际上并不了解他。斯克里帕尔只是一个中级情报官员,住在索尔兹伯里,我没有去拜访过他。斯克里帕尔事件向俄罗斯国内的叛徒发出了警告,同时也向英国发出了蔑视的信息。俄罗斯通过斯克里帕尔事件表达了对西方的不尊重和蔑视。

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Luke Harding recounts his 2007 move to Moscow, initially perceiving Russia as a semi-democracy. However, he soon discovered a stark reality: a country regressing into authoritarianism, controlled by a powerful and secretive state.
  • Luke Harding's initial perception of Russia as a semi-democracy
  • The reality of Russia's authoritarianism and KGB influence
  • The Russian state's two main projects: wealth accumulation and imperialist expansion
  • The West's failure to recognize and address Russia's shift towards authoritarianism

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Wondery Plus subscribers can binge entire seasons of British Scandal early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. And this is British Scandal. British Scandal

Matt, this has been such a gripping series. How have you found it? So many parts of this have been really difficult because at the heart of it is the human cost. Dawn Sturgis, an innocent member of the public, is murdered. She had absolutely nothing to do with Russia and there was no reason for her to die. Then you've got Sergei and Yulia Skripal. They didn't deserve their fate either. This terrifying nerve agent attack that they're lucky to survive. It really is, at its heart,

Absolutely chilling. Absolutely. I suppose the flip side to that from a British scandal perspective is that it's also completely absurd. The goons appearing on TV, the fandom for the 123 metre spire, Vladimir Putin's ludicrous accusations that this was some sort of

false flag operation by the British. It has all the elements that we love to get our teeth into. It does. And of course, our relationship with Russia is still something that exercises us today. It's more relevant than it's ever been. And this leaves us wondering whether the Salisbury attacks were the turning point they should have been.

Well, today I think is going to feel like a bit of a full circle moment because I'm very excited to say that our guest is our first ever guest on British Scandal when we covered the Litvinenko story. We are so pleased to welcome back Luke Harding, a journalist with first-hand experience of Putin's regime. He spent four years reporting on Putin as the Guardian's Moscow correspondent until he was expelled in 2011 for reporting that Russia had become a virtual mafia state.

He's written nine books, including Shadow State, a gripping investigation of Russia's covert war against Western democracy. It starts, of course, with the Salisbury poisonings. You don't want to miss this conversation. Luke Harding joins us next.

Hey.

Hey, I'm Cassie DePeckel, host of Wondery's podcast Against the Odds. In our new season, it's August 3rd, 1991. A cruise ship sails into a brutal storm off South Africa's wild coast and soon starts flooding. But with no leadership in sight, the ship's entertainers take charge, leading a desperate evacuation before Oceanos sinks. Listen to Against the Odds on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. ♪

Luke, thank you so much for joining us. If we can go back to 2007, what took you to Russia? I had a conversation, rather an enigmatic conversation with my then boss in Berlin, where I was working as the Guardian's

sort of international correspondent. And she just said to me, we think you need a bigger canvas. And I said, what does that mean? And she said, well, basically Moscow. It turned out that no one really wanted to go to Russia. I thought I could do it. I'd covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'd be based in Delhi, running around sort of South Asia. I had a sort of British wife and two kids and we were kind of versatile. We were good at languages. We're internationalists.

I'd read Dostoevsky, Russian literature. I hadn't studied Russian. I thought, OK, Moscow, big adventure. And the context of our relationship with Russia then was very different because the then Labour government was actively trying to woo Putin and bring him in from the cold. Well, that's right. I arrived in Moscow in January of 2007, kind of icy weather.

rather forbidding city, thinking that Russia was a semi-democracy, which I think is what probably the Labour government thought at the same time, heading slowly but inevitably towards a more kind of liberal, plural direction after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in fact, what I found was the reverse, was that this was a country going backwards, going back to the USSR, to a form of control and authoritarianism, and also to a KGB playbook where the spies

ran the town and were kind of immune to law or what we would consider to be norms. It was a kind of darkening authoritarian state. And do you think there's anything the West could have done at that point to nudge Russia towards a more democratic future? That's an interesting question. I mean, I think possibly not. The problem was that there was a huge gap, which I could see, you know, working and living in Moscow between what the Russian state said about itself and the truth. I mean, it said it was

a democracy, there was a parliament, there were laws, there was a facade of normalcy. But in reality, it was a secret state run by pretty thuggish individuals. They had two projects. One was to steal as much money as possible and to get super rich from oil, gas, and other natural resources. The other project was imperialist. It was expansionist. It was to restore

what they regarded as a kind of rightful zone of influence, which used to exist with the Soviet Union, but included Central and Eastern Europe, included countries like Ukraine, Georgia,

probably even the Baltic states and so on. And I sort of think that we, by which I mean kind of the UK, you know, politicians, government and so on, we were looking away. We were focused at that point on Islamist terrorism, on 9-11. And we didn't realize that Russia was changing. It was turning into something much, much nastier and something that would bring us problems down the road. Fast forwarding then to 2011, you find yourself deported by the Kremlin and blacklisted. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, we had a pretty torrid time in Moscow. I wrote a series of articles about top-level corruption. I posed the embarrassing question, how much money does Vladimir Putin have? Our answer, he's the richest person in the world, although of course a lot of this money isn't formally his, but he controls it. I also investigated the FSB, the domestic spy agency, which

Putin used to head before he became prime minister and president. And of course, it was the FSB that had murdered Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident in London in 2007 with a radioactive cup of tea. And my reward for this kind of journalism was that the FSB broke into our apartments, they put bugs everywhere, they had video in the bedroom, we were told by the British embassy. I was followed round by

unpromising young men in dark leather jackets from time to time. All my phone calls were listened to. It was kind of on off. In other words, this harassment was not continuous, but every couple of months something really unpleasant would happen. And did you anticipate that, Luke? Were you kind of expecting some kind of intervention like that?

I wasn't. I mean, the British Embassy were quite helpful. I mean, they explained that the Russians, their secret police did this to British diplomats, to Russian local staff working for the British Embassy, to Americans and so on. It was an old KGB technique of psychological harassment. Because if you can imagine Alice, someone, when you're not there, going into your bedroom, putting bugs there. I mean, at one point, they even left a sex manual

by the side of the marital bed, just to say that they were watching. And the goal was basically to make us leave, you know, for my wife to throw up her arms and say, "Darling, we can't take this anymore. Let's go back to London." And in fact, actually, I had a kind of private insight into just how cruel and horrible this regime was. And my wife was quite cool. And so we made jokes and we carried on. And in the end, of course, they won because

They cancelled my visa when I was flying back from London, put me in a cell at the airport and kicked me out of the country. I get the excitement of covering stories like this and being in places where the stories are happening, but do you ever worry about the risk to yourself or to your loved ones of covering these stories?

What I found unforgivable were the threats or the kind of pseudo threats against the kids. I mean, the first time they broke into our apartment in Moscow, we were living on the 10th floor of a kind of modern red brick tower block. And our six-year-old son had an IKEA bed next to a badly designed window, a low window, which for obvious reasons we double locked and came back after a dinner party to discover this window had been bust open next to my son's bed with a 20-meter drop to the courtyard below.

And I reported this to the British Embassy privately and they said, look, yeah, they're just sort of playing with your head. We've got no evidence that they actually target children. But I thought this was unforgivable. What kind of regime plays with the sort of primal fear of parents that something might happen to their children? And in a way, what I've been doing ever since, I mean, it's not exactly been revenge, but it's been more a kind of literary revenge.

and journalistic journey to really tell the truth about this particular nasty regime. It doesn't feel entirely out of the playbook, the idea that there's no evidence that they would...

use children in that way. I mean, there's such horrifying things that they do do. So the idea that that would be beyond the pale is sort of laughable, isn't it? Well, it is. And if we go on to the war in Ukraine, I mean, obviously, they've killed more than 600 Ukrainian children and abducted many thousands and taken them back to Russia from occupied areas. So there are a few taboos

actually for the Russian state and for its spy agencies. They feel they can behave like gods. They can decide who lives and who dies. Roman emperors, thumbs up and thumbs down. And there's a whole kind of mechanism, a sort of bureaucracy of death, where decisions are taken behind closed doors to punish certain people. I mean, what slightly consoled me when I was in Moscow was that I understood how the system worked and that essentially if you're Russian, and of course the Russians are

think Ukrainians are Russian, then anything can happen to you. You can be arrested or nothing, or you can be killed, or the tax police can raid your office and so on. If you're foreign, especially if you're a foreign journalist, the assumption is you're a spy. So you're a spy, Alice, you know, Matt, I'm a spy. We're all spies working for MI6. We're kind of James Bond. And so spies can be hounded and bugged and videoed.

But generally, they're not targeted. Having said all that, I was quite surprised to be deported. I mean, I was the first Western correspondent to be expelled from Russia, thrown out of Russia since the Cold War.

Hello, I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist. And I'm David McCloskey, CIA analyst turned spy novelist. Together we're the co-hosts of The Rest is Classified, where we bring you the best stories from the world of secrets and spams. We have just released a series on the decades-long battle between the CIA and Osama bin Laden, and this week we are stepping into the devastation of the 9-11 terror attacks to understand how Osama bin Laden was able to carry out

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Our series is focused on the Salisbury poisoning. So take us back to the 4th of March 2018. Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia collapse on a bench in Salisbury. What's going through your mind when you first hear about that story? I mean, that's a really interesting question. I mean, I had sort of two reactions. The first one was, I can't believe they've done it again, because I'd written a whole book about

Alexander Litvinenko and his sort of teapot murder called A Very Expensive Poison. So I'd been going around the UK, I'd been speaking at literary festivals, I had become close friends with Litvinenko's widow Marina. I knew everybody from the world of the Russian opposition who were, to be frank, were being kind of eliminated one by one. So my first thing was sort of surprise, actually, that they would do it again in this kind of brazen way. And my second surprise

if I'm honest, was frustration because I thought I knew everybody. I'd had lunch with Oleg Gordievsky, who was the most high-profile

British asset, KGB officer recruited by MI6 in the 70s, smuggled out by British spies in the boot of a car in the mid-1980s, taken to Finland. He was absolutely top of the list of people the Kremlin would wish to kill. And Skripal, I didn't know. He was more or less at the bottom of the list. He was a sort of middle-ranking intelligence officer working for the GRU, that's Russian military intelligence, living pretty quietly in Salisbury,

And I hadn't been to see him. But beyond that, I could see this was a huge story with international ramifications. I had a couple of messages. One, of course, to Russians, to anyone inside Russia thinking of collaborating with the West or defecting or talking to British spies, which was, you know, we can catch up with you at a time of our choosing. We will

finish you when we want. A very kind of chilling message. But the second message was directed at the British state and the British spy agencies, and it was basically, fuck you. It was fuck you. And it was kind of, okay, you take our traitors, but we will kill our traitors. And there's nothing you can do about it because you're kind of weak, you're decadent, you're failing. We don't respect you at all. The doctrine of the modern Russian state under Putin is fuck you-ism. Really, the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal was the kind of ultimate fuck you-istic act.

That leads me on to a question that I've been wondering about the method, about using Novichok, a chemical weapon tied directly to Russia's Cold War past. So are you saying that that was a message? It wasn't just an assassination. That was supposed to read as well. Yeah, what you have to understand about Russian spying is that it's not like in the movies. It's not Netflix. It's not immaculate. It's not especially clever. It is crude. It is demonstrative. It is even theatrical.

There's something vaudevillian about it, actually, that you send two goons carrying Novichok on a plane with woolly hats to go to Gatwick Airport. They stay in a quite crummy hotel in the east end of London in Bow. I've seen it. Then they take the train, do a recce, meet probably with a third man in London. Then they go back and they smear Novichok on the door handle of Skripal's semi-truck.

in in sleepy salisbury you know the russians are not stupid they must have known that these two would-be killers would be captured on cctv and the point is they don't care that's part of it it is sending a message that we are the masters in the situation and we can do whatever we want to whomever we want when we want

Because, of course, we had flashbacks to Kovtun and Lugovoy from covering Litvinenko, and we couldn't believe how much history was repeating itself with the incompetence.

Yeah, I had quite an interesting conversation with someone called Viktor Savorov, who's a former GRU officer turned author. He was saying, look, back in my day, the assassins were good. They were trained, they were competent, they were professional, they were linguists. And these are just sort of mediocre provincial thugs. And to a certain extent, it speaks to the degeneracy of Russia under Putin, that it's not talented people that used to roam the halls of Soviet foreign intelligence.

It's sort of loyal idiots with military training who are part of kill teams, diversionary units. They're given special tasks, and the special task that weekend was to kill Sergei Skripal. So Russia used Novichok so that the world knows that they've done it, but as well as doing that, through Russia Today, Sputnik, and other avenues, they were spreading misinformation that because Salisbury was close to Porton Down, that in effect...

Britain had done this to itself. And there were members of parliament here that were getting up on the floor of the House of Commons and asking questions that seemed sympathetic to that theory. So do you think Russia had deliberately manipulated influential people or whether these people were just choosing to say that themselves? There's a famous phrase that Lenin came up with to describe communist sympathizers in the West, and he called them useful idiots. And I'm afraid, really, up until...

I would say Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there were quite a few useful idiots out there. Some were on the kind of hard right of British politics and some were on the far left. And they both found...

something rather attractive about the Russian state under Vladimir Putin. I mean, different things. Those on the far left basically saw the Russians as sticking it to American imperialism. It was kind of binary. The Americans were evil imperialists and the Russians were defying American hegemony and trying to set up a kind of an anti-pole to US power. So certain people found that attractive. And on the other side, there were people on the hard right of UK politics who liked the idea of this strong,

sovereign, white, Christian, anti-feminist country, anti-LGBT countries supposedly doing its own thing. And of course, there was a common enemy in the European Union. I mean, Russia hates the European Union, wants to undermine it, supported Brexit actually quite extensively. So on either side, you had people who wanted to really understand Russia or give Russia the benefit of the doubt. And they were wrong.

One of the surreal and memorable moments in the Skripal case was when the suspects, Mishkin and Chapiga, or Petrov and Bosirov, did an interview with Russia Today, which went viral. What did you make of that bizarre press appearance? Do you think they were trying to convince the world genuinely, or were they just trolling?

I mean, yeah, it must be one of the all-time memorable media performances when Petrov and Bashurov appeared on Russia Today. They were being interviewed by Margarita Simonyan, who is a key propagandist, a key figure in the Kremlin propaganda world, probably the key figure. Look, what can we say? It was clear that they'd been told they had to do this, that they had to appear on TV. And their explanation for why they were in the UK was so

It was so hilarious that even Simonyan couldn't stop laughing when they said that they'd read about Salisbury. They were beguiled by its medieval spire. Easy now, that spire is revered. The spire is revered, but probably not in provincial Siberia. No, probably not. And I mean, my take on it is that basically I think it was trolling. It was trolling. It's like, we're lying. You know we're lying. And we disrespect you so much, we're not even going to come up with a...

with a vaguely shiny lie, we're going to send you a kind of ludicrous in-your-face lie, and we're going to laugh at you." I think that's what was going on. I mean, there were terrible media performers. And I think one intriguing question we don't know about is, are they still alive? Where are they? I mean, who knows? But I don't think we're going to see them again. And from the Kremlin's perspective, was the Salisbury attack a success or failure? I mean, I think on balance it was a success.

actually, it showed that Russia was a big power with its own rules. And that even after Litvinenko, the British state hadn't really grasped that or not sufficiently. One other important point is that

When we're looking at these events, we have to understand one fundamental fact. That fact is that Russia thinks it is at war with the UK and the West more generally. It's a martial war. It's a civilizational war. It's a propaganda and informational war. Once you understand that they think they're at war with us, then you understand why they would send killers to roam around the streets of Salisbury with this deadly toxin. Otherwise, it makes no sense. It's surreal and

bizarre. And it's actually taken a very long time for successive governments here to grasp that. We may not want it, but it's the reality is that Russia wishes to harm us and will use all sorts of methods to do so. And we know that Russia takes a dim view of NATO, of Western democracy in general, but what is it about the UK specifically that makes it target us? I mean, I think there are a couple of reasons. One is

They are obsessed with MI6. They think the Secret Insurgents Service, I think they rate it as a pretty effective organization. I mean, certainly Russian state TV is full of specials, documentaries on the work of British spies. They'll pick on some second secretary in the British embassy and expose them on primetime. So they really hate MI6 and they regard MI6 quite highly.

But the other reason is, of course, is that London, for a long time, has been a place which has been popular with Russian emigres. I mean, going all the way back to Lenin, who, before the Russian Revolution, used to hang out in the British Library. I mean, they're intrigued by oligarchs, by dissidents, by rich Russians who...

would live in the UK. They would recruit some of them. They would spy on others. We're talking about Skripal, but we haven't actually mentioned Boris Berezovsky, who was a Russian oligarch who was very close to Putin, who helped him become prime minister and president. They then fell out and he decamped to London in 2000 and then died in mysterious circumstances, was found hanged in his ex-wife's apartment in Berkshire five years before the Skripal poisoning. So Berezovsky is

really turned London into Londongrad. I mean, he was campaigning against Putin from London. That enormously irritated the Kremlin. So yeah, they're obsessed by the UK. The Russian elite, the spies, they've all read Sherlock Holmes. They like Sherlock Holmes stories. And there's a phrase that's used on Russian TV to describe the UK as a sort of shorthand. They call it, too many Albion, too many Albion, which means foggy Albion.

And when I was in Moscow, I tried to explain that the climate had changed. We didn't really have fog anymore. But no one was listening. That is such a good detail. Considering that Litvinenko wasn't that long before in relative terms, why wasn't more done to protect Sergei Skripal and his family? That's a very good question. We don't know the answer to that. There is an answer, but it's a secret answer. What we do know, or at least what we suspect, is that Sergei Skripal's handler, former MI6 handler, lived there.

nearby. So in other words, it wasn't entirely by chance that he ended up in Salisbury. And certainly with high profile Russian assets, there is, I mean, you can call it a duty of care, but I know that the security services keep pretty close tabs on these Russian emigres.

They try and protect them. They check in with them. I mean, a lot of it is pastoral. From time to time, they will go and have lunch with Russian assets, see if they're okay. And I think there are pretty big questions for MI6. Why did they not see this coming? I mean, we now know that the Russians had been trailing Yulia Skripal for at least a year. She would fly to London and there was a kind of very good-looking blonde woman

guy who would start talking to her about her life. And of course, he turned out to be an FSB agent. In other words, there was a lot of activity around the Skripals in the run up to this hit. And either it wasn't spotted or it wasn't taken very seriously. I think ultimately, the spy services made a mistake. You go to Skripal's house, he's living on an ordinary kind of cul-de-sac with neighbors, there's no special protection. There's a big picture window. I mean, it was actually quite easy to

poison him. And, you know, I'd be intrigued to know what the internal audit was, what conclusions were learned. And one thing we do know is that for the other Russian emigres living in the UK, other defectors, security was immediately stepped up. In the wake of the attack, there were diplomatic expulsions and there was international outrage. But why was there such a lack of real accountability? I mean, I think there was a lack of real accountability because actually there was a fear of confronting Russia

too much and a failure of imagination. I mean, sure. So Russia does something extraordinary, a warlike deed, which leads to the death of a

of a completely innocent civilian who just picked up Novichok and died a horrendous death in hospital. And we respond by expelling diplomats and with words of condemnation, which is pretty much what the Russians expected us to do. And of course they don't care. There's not going to be a legal procedure. Petrov and Bashur are never going to be extradited. They're never going to be in the Old Bailey standing trial jail for 20 years.

I think there was a kind of unwillingness, as I said, to kind of recognise Russia for what it is, this mafia state or shadow state, which is the title of the book I wrote about this whole case, and to respond accordingly with more than diplomatic measures. I mean, there were some sanctions, but frankly, I think the UK and other countries should have gone so much further. As you say, those diplomatic expulsions felt insubstantial as the entire reaction, but it must have been a blow to the Russian spy network.

I mean, that's true. I mean, the Russian spy network has had some triumphs over the last 10 years, but there are setbacks as well. And certainly, really, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the sort of classic Russian intelligence officer network has been rolled up, not just in London, but also in Paris, Berlin, and other places. But of course, the Russians don't give up. There's a sort of criminal energy about this regime. And so what they've started doing increasingly is recruiting...

third country nationals, you know, people who haven't got Russian passports. Sometimes they're Ukrainian, sometimes they're from Central Asia. Recently, we've seen this extraordinary spy case centered around Great Yarmouth, featuring Bulgarians working for the Russian spy agencies. So the Russians try and find a way, but their intelligence officers based in Kensington, based in London, most of them were cleaned out. You mentioned that Bulgarian spy ring that was recently convicted for spying for Russia across the UK and Europe. What do we know about them?

Essentially, what we know is that they were recruited to spy on various people, including Christo Grozev, who was a key figure in Bellingcat, the open source investigation, which

More than anyone exposed Petrov and Bashirov, discovered their real identities as Mishkin and Chapiga, and kind of publicized this around the world. So the two stories coincide, the Great Yarmouth Spies and the Skripal episode, there's overlap. And I think what it says is that, among other things, is that the GRU has a long memory. They don't forget, they don't forgive. And Grozev, who outed Petrov and Bashirov, he ended up having to leave Europe

And he's relocated to America because basically he was told that if he stayed in Europe, he would get whacked. So this story isn't over. I mean, we're talking about one interesting and alarming chapter from 2018, but I can predict there will be further chapters ahead. So how should democratic societies respond to the kind of covert actions we're talking about?

I think conventional international processes of meetings, of summits, of negotiations, of trying to find mutual solutions, they don't work. Putin's not interested in any of this. He sees that as weakness, as a way of dividing up countries and making gains. Where we are is really, we're back to a place of neocontainment where we have to help Ukraine, of course, first and foremost, but also imagine that it's quite possible that Russia will attack

somewhere else, either the Baltics or Poland or Moldova, if it prevails in Ukraine, and that its sabotage operations continue, whether it's cutting undersea cables in the Baltics or paying moronic criminals to blow up

or burn down warehouses or fly drones over military sites and so on, that this is a kind of rolling campaign of sabotage. I mean, we shouldn't be paranoid, but we should kind of be vigilant. And I think the most important thing is to call things what they are. So what we're dealing with in Russia is it's the world's foremost spy state, actually, where the spies are in charge. It's a fascist power in the 21st century, and it wants to chew up the European map and to restore the Russian empire.

Do you think the UK is doing enough to deter the kinds of attacks that we've seen on Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal in the future? We've gone from denial about what Russia is to acceptance to actually realizing that we have to change everything. I think Keir Starmer actually gets it, that we have to spend more money on defense. You know, Russia isn't finished. I mean, Russia says it just wants to take Ukraine, but actually...

I don't believe that. And I think most European countries don't believe that either. So we're in a new uncertain world, actually, also where we can't rely on America anymore. America's been

Voting with Russia in the United Nations General Assembly and with North Korea, I think has essentially swapped sides in the war in Ukraine. I mean, there are consequences of that. I mean, one is the UK has to work closer with European partners. Two is we need to spend more money on defence, on drones, on the military-industrial complex. We might not want to, but we have to. And three, we have to watch out for more

rogue episodes like Skripal, like Litvinenko. Yeah, the Russian spy network in the UK took a knock in 2022, but they haven't given up and they will be back. Is it too simplistic to say that had we been more muscular in our response to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, that Russia wouldn't have invaded Crimea in 2014? And had we been more muscular in our response to the attack on Salisbury, that Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine a second time?

It may have given Putin pause for thought. It certainly would have been the right thing to do, to have shut the Russian embassy, booted out all diplomats, done massive sanctions, barred

Russian companies from listing on the stock exchange, scrapping the visa program, which ran up until comparatively recently, where rich Russians could buy British passports in return for investments. We should have really taken newspapers away from Russian oligarchs, British newspapers who bought them. Chelsea. I mean, now it's gone. Roman Abramovich has been forced to sell it. But this is something we could have done 15 years ago. There were all sorts of measures we could have taken. And

Unfortunately, we didn't take them. Having said all that, I really think on Ukraine that Putin has long been obsessed with Ukraine. And I think what was significant with Ukraine was the weak response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. And basically, Putin, when he did the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he thought it would be like 2014 again. First of all, he'd be able to take Kiev. His troops would roll into the presidential administration, kill Zelensky. He could establish a pro-Ukraine

puppet regime fairly quickly, and the West would reluctantly suck it up. That was his plan. And I think he's been taken aback, both by the resistance, I would say heroic resistance from Ukrainians, but also that the relative robustness of the European coalition against him. But I think really, by about 2021, he was going to do Ukraine, actually, he was going to do a big invasion. And by that point, I think there's nothing we could have done to stop him.

Looking 10, 20 years down the line, what do you think Salisbury will represent? A turning point? A warning? I mean, I think Salisbury will represent a kind of chain, one of those kind of dark moments which really brought or should have brought kind of clarity to what Russia is in the 21st century. I mean, we could have reacted accordingly. We didn't want to because

It was tough. It was tricky. It meant that we would have to make hard choices and explain them to our domestic population. So I think the Salisbury poisonings would be a symbol of what Russia has become. It's turned into a rogue state, a shadow state, a mafia state, where it feels it can kill people anywhere, anytime, anyplace, and take advantage of our kind of weakness and failure to see things differently.

how they are. So I mean, I think it's one of the kind of the most significant moments of, you could say the post Cold War, or the new Cold War, or actually the Cold War keeping going. But it was a very, very dramatic moment in Russia's struggle against the West. Matt, we have to get Luke Harding on more frequently than every four years. Tell me then what we're doing next.

Well, I don't want to upset you, Alice, because I know you're a huge fan of the royal family and you hate it when people gossip about their love lives, their failed marriages and their affairs. I absolutely do. So I'm sorry to let you know that this series has all of the above and much, much more. Royal divorces. The tragic death of a much-loved member of the royal family. Have some respect. And a little beheading. Okay, I'm listening. We're going back in time then, I presume.

No, pretty recent. I'm kidding. Of course, we're going back in time to an era of treason, treachery and religious reformation. Next series, we're looking at the second of Henry VIII's wives and Berlin. In my opinion, too soon. Tasteless.

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Behind the closed doors of government offices and military compounds, there are hidden stories and buried secrets from the darkest corners of history. From covert experiments pushing the boundaries of science to operations so secretive they were barely whispered about.

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From Wondery and Samizdat Audio, this is the fourth and final episode in our series, The Salisbury Poisonings. British Scandal is hosted by me, Alice Levine. And me, Matt Ford. For Samizdat, our producer is Redsy Bernard. Our assistant producer is Louise Mason. Our senior producers are Joe Sykes and Dasha Lusitsina. Our engineer is Jai Williams. For Wondery, our senior producer is Theodora Leloudis. And our senior managing producer is Rachel Sibley.

Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne and Marshall Louis. Today is the worst day of Abby's life. The 17-year-old cradles her newborn son in her arms. They all saw how much I loved him. They didn't have to take him from me. Between 1945 and the early 1970s, families shipped their pregnant teenage daughters to maternity homes and forced them to secretly place their babies for adoption.

In hidden corners across America, it's still happening. My parents had me locked up in the godparent home against my will. They worked with them to manipulate me and to steal my son away from me. The godparent home is the brainchild of controversial preacher Jerry Falwell.

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