There is strong circumstantial evidence, but proof is a slightly different game. It would be nice, for example, to have a clear motive for why Russia might have poisoned the man. According to the wiki article the Russian justice system had sentenced him to 13 years in a penal colony in 2006, and then handed him over in a prisoners exchange in 2010. What happened to upgrade that to a death sentence in 2018 that the GRU didn't know about in 2006-2010?
Evidence should be a high bar. We might suspect the Russians, but lets not pretend there is any clear public evidence beyond government say-so. The government can be wrong, just like the rest of us.
The UK government can be wrong, but it the absence of any plausible alternative candidates, it's probably right to conclude the perpetrator is the party known to have carried out similar attacks against similar targets using similar deniable but too sophisticated to be regular criminal means using a murder weapon identified as one they are known to have created. Especially when their public response is trolling and branding the victim a traitor rather than alarm.
On the other hand, having a clearly Russian pedigree may be precisely the reason it was used; either to send a strong message to would-be dissenters in the Russian intelligence sphere or to make it look like a Russian hit.
Spooks doing what spooks do, it seems.
this is the dicey bit with spy games. part of the goal is to ensure courtroom proof isn't available.
> why Russia might have poisoned the man
Kill double agents as warnings? disloyal spies aren't exactly popular.
My impression is Russia is moving to an execution phase for a plan of action.
If you genuinely think the UK needed a couple more dead Russian dissidents (and pretty unsympathetic ones at that) to justify stricter sanctions on Russia, you really, really don't understand the relevant politics.
It reminds me how some religious communities go after the people who don't follow their rules even after they flee to other country [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky#Assassination
[2] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2017/05/25/we-will-set-them-str...
https://cs9.pikabu.ru/post_img/2018/03/13/8/1520947357114473...
And
http://i12.pixs.ru/storage/2/3/6/Bezimyanni_3398267_29746236...
Nobody is stupid enough to honestly believe that. Nobody. Jog on troll.
He took a meeting, hoping to be allowed back, and instead was poisoned. Sounds plausible to me, but then again its really similar to the plot of McMafia.
But it just as easily could be a false flag. I don't trust the Orwellian British anymore than I do the ruskies.
There is just too little public info to say for sure. For example, how are the Brits so sure it was a Novochik agent? Especially since they are designed to be untraceable.
So, no. You can't claim its only available in Russia, if you've positively identified it using these signatures .. since you'd have had to have the material to compare with, yourself ..
I don't entertain the false flag narrative because it is so difficult to disprove. If the UK was willing to kill this man and endanger the lives of their citizens to destabilize Russian relations, then pretty much anything is possible. Even if this was some special nerve agent that only Russia is able to make, the UK could simply kill the man with a similar nerve agent and claim it was the special Russia one. If you can't trust the UK government here, than they could easily fabricate or claim they have hard proof of Russian involvement. You also have to ask yourself what hard proof of Russian involvement would even look like, and how realistic it would be to find such a thing even if Russia were to be involved.
I agree, he changed dramatically sometime around or during the Trump campaign; I hardly recognize him any longer.
He's turned Wikileaks into his own personal vendetta machine.
Putin is given far too much credit. But the Russian wetworks division, under Putin's authority, has its fingerprints all over the Salisbury attack.
> shouldn't people like Assange reveal it?
Largely Assange has been an anti-liberal democracy apologist for the last 5+ years. A sad turn for someone starting at a radical anarchist position, but it's been pretty obvious. He's also largely destroyed any of Wikileaks rep as a honest broker and reduced it to the reputation of "anti-US intelligence". AFAICT, he's operating as a (probably unwitting) Russian front these days.