Yulia Skripal
© facebook.com/julia.skripalYulia Skripal at her 'press conference'
In my last piece, I attempted to show how on 4th July, when Yulia Skripal called her cousin, Viktoria, she appeared blissfully unaware of the British Government's central claim that the poisoning of her and her father was carried out by the Russian state. So blissfully unaware, in fact, that somewhat bizarrely she seemed to think that her cousin Viktoria was responsible for the publicity around the incident, and she also expressed her desire to return to Russia soon - the country whose Government was apparently responsible for attempting to assassinate her father. The Keepers of the Official Narrative are welcome to explain that, if they can.

I now want to go back to an earlier statement she made, which I also think is quite revealing. This is the one when she was "interviewed" by Reuters, significant for the fact that it was the world's first interview where the interviewer was not allowed to put any questions to the interviewee. She started her statement as follows:
"I came to the UK on the 3rd of March to visit my father, something I have done regularly in the past. After 20 days in a coma, I woke to the news that we had both been poisoned."
So far so good. She did come into London on March 3rd and was hospitalised with poisoning the day after. But then we get this:
"I still find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that both of us were attacked. We are so lucky to have both survived this attempted assassination. Our recovery has been slow and extremely painful. The fact that a nerve agent was used to do this is shocking. I don't want to describe the details but the clinical treatment was invasive, painful and depressing" [my emphasis].
"The fact that both of us were attacked"??? Hmm! Is this a fact, according to the official narrative? No, it most certainly is not.

Let me explain what I mean by bringing in the third person to be poisoned in the Salisbury case, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. In the statement released on his behalf on 22nd March, he said the following:
"I want people to focus on the investigation - not the police officer who was unfortunate enough to be caught up in it." [my emphasis].
Like Yulia, D.S. Bailey was poisoned. Unlike Yulia, however, he describes himself not as having been attacked, but as being unfortunately caught up in the incident - a bystander to the actual assassination attempt, who just happened to become involved.

But what about Yulia? She apparently believes that both she and her father were attacked, since she states, "the fact that both of us were attacked." The question is, however, was she attacked, or was she merely caught up in the attack? Let's turn to the official narrative to find out.

There are two angles we can answer this from: one, is to look at the apparent motive given by the British Government for the attack on Mr Skripal; the other is to look at the apparent method of the attempted assassination itself.

Regarding the motive, the attack on Mr Skripal is said by the British Government to have been a simple desire for revenge and sending out a message by Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin against a man they considered a traitor (even though they let him go years earlier, and even though such an assassination would be massively counter-productive, in that it would destroy any hopes they have for future spy swaps. But we'll let these things pass for now). But if this was the motive, then it cannot have been an attempt to kill Yulia as well, since she was not a spy and did not betray her country, can it?

Next, consider the method: "Novichok" on the door handle. Now, it requires the divesting of more common sense than I am personally prepared to give up, to believe that the FSB thinks this to be an effective method of assassinating even one person. But assassinating two??? Even those who have no qualms about throwing common sense out of the window in order to believe the FSB thinks smearing military grade nerve agent on a door handle in a suburban street in broad daylight is an effective method of conducting a targeted assassination on one person, surely cannot make themselves believe that the FSB thinks it an effective method of targeting two people. It's ridiculously, absurdly, laughably untargeted, given that they could never be sure that both people would touch the door handle.


Comment: Even Salisbury residents think the story is fishy:



And so even according to the already absurd notion of a targeted assassination attempt, involving the smearing of enough nerve agent to kill half the population of Salisbury on a door handle in broad daylight without a chemical warfare suit (perhaps with a pair of marigolds), the idea that Yulia was in any way "attacked" is patently ridiculous. The most you could say about her, according to the official narrative, is that like the statement put out on D.S. Bailey's behalf, she was simply "unfortunate enough to be caught up in it."

So why does she say that she finds it difficult to come to terms with - as she puts it - "the fact that both of us were attacked"? And why is this statement then followed immediately by one about both of them having "survived this attempted assassination," which together implies that she believes herself to have been as much a target of the assassination attempt as her father?

Of course, it could be objected that I am just nit-picking over words. She says she's been attacked, by which she simply means that she was a victim of the poisoning, along with her dad, but she realises that it was him they were really after. She just uses a different phrase than that used by D.S. Bailey to describe being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But no, it's not nit-picking, and for a number of good reasons:
  1. The wording she uses is very explicit that the attack - the assassination attempt - was on both of them, and she calls this a fact.
  2. She then says she finds it "difficult to come to terms" with this fact. This is crucial. She is not saying that she finds it difficult to come to terms with the fact that both of them were poisoned. She is not even saying she finds it difficult to come to terms with the fact that her dad was attacked and that she was unwittingly poisoned. No, what she explicitly states is that she is finding it difficult to come to terms with the fact that both of them were attacked.
  3. Nowhere in her statement to Reuters, nor in any other statement that has been released on her behalf, or any conversation that she has had with her cousin Viktoria, do we get any sense that she thinks it was just her father who was being attacked, with her an unfortunate victim. In fact, in the statement put out on her behalf on 11th April, she explicitly stated that she was attacked:
"I find myself in a totally different life than the ordinary one I left just over a month ago, and I am seeking to come to terms with my prospects, whilst also recovering from this attack on me" [my emphasis].
If we take Yulia's words at face value, we come to following conclusion: She does not think that the assassin(s) targeted her father and she just happened to be there; rather, she believes that the assassin(s) targeted both of them together.

But this does not fit the official narrative at all. As I argued above, the Kremlin-ordered, door handle narrative, apart from being utterly ridiculous, totally excludes the possibility that this was a hit on both of them, both from the motive and the method perspective. Further, I imagine that had the Kremlin ordered a hit on Sergei alone, many if not most Russians would have shrugged their shoulders at the thought of a man they considered a traitor being killed. Whereas if the hit was ordered on Yulia as well? How would that play back home? Not very well, as you can probably imagine.

So what's really going on?

As I argued in my previous piece, in her conversation at the beginning of July, Yulia appeared to be utterly in the dark about the claim that the Russian state was behind the poisoning, blaming her cousin for the publicity surrounding it, and stating that she was annoyed that this publicity meant she couldn't return to Russia. The fact that she believes she was attacked and was a target for assassination, shows that either she doesn't believe the door handle narrative or - more likely - that at the time of her "interview" she hadn't actually been told this. Think about it. Assuming she has some wits about her, there is simply no way that she could possibly believe that the smearing of Novichok on her father's door handle was a targeted attack on both of them. It's an absurd way of targeting one person; a simply deranged way of targeting two, since there could be no guarantee that both her father and her would touch the handle.

Let me therefore summarise the gist of this:
  1. The official narrative precludes the idea that Yulia was attacked and was the target of assassination, since the motive only fits Sergei (the killing of a traitor), and the method (Novichok on the door handle) could never guarantee that both of them would be poisoned.
  2. And yet Yulia believes that both she and her father were attacked in an assassination attempt, and it is this fact, not being the unwitting victim of a poisoning, that she is finding hard to come to terms with.
  3. Therefore, either she has heard the door handle theory but doesn't believe it, or she is not aware of it at all.
Why, then, does she believe that she, as well as her father, were attacked? Why, then, does she think that she, as well as her father, were targeted by an assassin? Presumably because she remembers being attacked, would be my guess. But of course if that's the case, it cannot have been anything to do with a door handle.