DISINFO: UK special bodies can be implicated in Yushchenko, Skripals, and Navalny poisoning
SUMMARY
The UK special services used to attack Russia long before the Skripals poisoning. The story of UK-based Strategic Communications Laboratory (SCL Group) which carried out disinformation campaigns against Russia since the early 1990s is one example. The SCL Group was involved in the Orange revolution events in Ukraine in 2004. The revolution succeeded thanks to strange poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko. Today Kyiv acknowledges that the poisoning never took place. One cannot rule out that the SCL Group was implicated in this and other poisonings, including the Skripals and some Russian activists.
RESPONSE
This is one of the multiple conspiracy theories around the Skripals poisoning which implicates the now-defunct UK-based private company SCL Group.
The poisoning of the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has been confirmed in 2009 by The Lancet. According to this research, TTCD dioxin levels in Yushchenko`s blood were more than 50,000 times higher than normal. Also, the same research claims: “The dioxin used to poison Yushchenko could have been produced in numerous laboratories because it was a purified version that has no natural source”. There is no evidence to connect the poisoning to SCL Group, even though it is true that the Group has claimed to had helped the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004.
The reference to 'some Russian activists' most likely is addressed to Alexei Navalny, who has been poisoned by Novichok in August 2020. The pro-Kremlin media has drawn numerous parallels between Navalny and Skripals poisoning. Most of them were coupled with the usual denial: “there is no evidence that Navalny was poisoned” or that “London has no evidence of Moscow’s complicity in the Skripals’ poisoning”. Read more about this in our past analysis titled Salisbury all over again.
The German federal government said that toxicological tests provided “unequivocal evidence of a chemical nerve agent of the Novichok group” in the blood samples of Alexei Navalny. As for Skripal case, after a hearing in the Court of Protection, British High Court Justice David Williams issued an approved judgement about what had happened to the Skripals around three weeks after their poisoning in March 2018. The British Police have presented a solid chain of evidence on the Skripal case, with pictures, connecting the suspects to the locations in the case. Some of the material has been released to the public. The evidence was sufficient to charge two Russian nationals, Anatoliy Chepiga and Aleksandr Mishkin with the attack on the Skripals, both Russian military intelligence operatives from the GRU, who travelled to the UK using fake names and documents.
See earlier disinformation cases alleging that only Navalny’s entourage may be interested in his death, that poisoning of Navalny is a provocation to spoil relations between Russia and Germany, that it is unclear, who really poisoned Sergei and Yuliya Skripal, or that Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned by cosmetic procedures.