So Yulia Skripal contacted reuters news agency through the Metropolitan Police and issued two written and one video taped statements. I might think reuters to be an odd choice for someone looking to break a story when there are so many other (how to say?) more sensationalist and more widely read publications in the UK. But hey.
Anyway. She has stated she wants to go home to Russia and has publicly thanked the Russian Embassy for their offers of assistance.
Given that we’ve been assured the Russian government lies behind the poisoning of the Skripals, and given there have no doubt been quite in-depth conversations between the Skripals and whatever arm of the British state, it strikes me as somewhat astonishing that she’d state a desire to return to the country whose government tried to “off” her. Unless of course, what the UK Government, and others garnering their information from the UK government, have been spouting tosh all along.
Angus Roxburgh, a former adviser to the Russian government during the Yeltsin years writing for the Guardian has it covered off. Yulia was apparently “delivering a coded message” – according to the headline of his piece. I read it. But it seems he forgot to include the decoding of whatever the coded message was. A small oversight. But whatever, he doesn’t seem to be overly convinced that the UK Government has been batting with a straight bat.
Meanwhile, we have Mary Djevsky writing for “The Independent” articulating some of the many obvious questions that surround the official UK version of events while still nobly trying to salvage some credibility for the UK Government’s line.
So what does a government usually do when its version of a major event starts to come apart at the seams? That’s right. It throws in a new story to divert the focus and fill those headlines (And bang on cue, reports from the Dutch investigation of flight MH17 fingering Russia*).
If that’s why the timing of the MH17 allegations, they needn’t have bothered. It seems the UK’s Liberal media are more than happy to relegate the Skripal story these days and run with North Korea, Brexit and Harvey Weinstein (The Guardian) or Brexit, Weinstein and ministerial aids quitting their positions (The Independent).
That’s to be expected. The job of the media is to generate memes and not to undermine that which they help to create. And yes, I know, we’re only to think it’s the more dubious or nefarious media operating from within countries that our governments aren’t too hot on that do that. My bad.
* It appears that no actual report has been published
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