Interesting court defence.
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I find it odd that people who suffer from the same type of poison all appear to be on the wrong side of the Russian authorities.................

To quote Auric Goldfinger "Once is happenstance, twice is co-incidence, the third time is enemy action"

John LeCarre make a very similar quote in his book the Pigeon Tunnel .

I'm not sure where this narrative of Russian infallibility is coming from. They regularly make monumental c**k ups. Kursk, Chernobyl, Admiral Kuznetsov etc. etc.

I'm not a signal tech, but I would expect that the G2 teams can triangulate the source(s) of the jamming. If they can't, the should throw some serious effort at the task. :suspect:

Oh puleeze this is a silly argument.
I simply noted that Russian killings tend to use a maximum of force, usually way more than needed, just to make sure.
These Inspector Clouzeau type attacks, where the target is affected but not killed, are inconsistent with the usual Russian MO imho.
Obviously I could be quite wrong, maybe the Russian killers are usually that inept, but I've no comparable examples of incompetent killing by the Russian secret services.

Is a direct confirmation from a member of the Russian security services also unlikely to change your mind about whether the Russians always kill when they mean to, Etudiant?

Navalny Says He Duped Russian Agent Into Confessing Poison Plot (rferl.org)

More likely the Turks are playing silly buggers using a bit of Russian kit to deflect away from the Turkish expansionistic Neo-Ottoman plans for the rest of the Mediterranean and Holy Land .

Etudiant, I love your confidence in Russia’s apparatus of murder.

In my experience generally in life so far if there is an option to choose between “conspiracy” and “cock-up” when an operational outcome is sub-standard, then “cock-up” is invariably the reason.

The Russians use poison in cases where they fear blowback and need (scarcely) plausible deniability. For lower profile targets they are happy to use more direct and reliable means such as “falling” down stairwells or straightforward shooting. I don’t think that many western nations can take any moral high ground on the issue of assassinations, most have done fairly grubby things in the past.

The problem is that Putin sets the threshold for extrajudicial and (most seriously) extraterritorial killings far too low for a rules based world order. If everyone behaved as Russia currently do then it would be far more difficult to maintain global stability.

Agree that 'stuff happens' and is often more likely than conspiracy when plans go pear shaped.
The Navalny tapes that Ewan Whosearmy linked surely support that as well. They suggest more squeamishness on part of the Russians that I'd have expected, which resulted in mission failure..
Having noted that poor result, the Russians logically would become more blatantly goal focused, as the subsequent Navalny prison sentence indicates.
The 'legal process' worked for Khodorkovsky, so just replay the script, with the details changed as appropriate.

Might add that the Navalny tapes do strongly suggest that he got serious help from Western intelligence, faking a call as coming from within the FSB is not what most politicians are capable of.