He pointed out that Litvinenko was a former FSB security services officer who killed by his old organization, while Skripal, a former GRU officer, was killed by his own former intelligence unit. “Perhaps that is a relevant pattern,” he said.
He said the attempted assassination of Skripal by the GRU would “probably” not have been known about by Russia’s other intelligence agencies, and even Russian’s foreign ministry.
“There is quite often tension between organizations in the Russian state security services, they do not cooperate well, if at all,” Allen said. “The FSB and the SVR, the external agency, both rather also look down on the GRU and see it as rather reckless and sometimes a little unprofessional.”
Tackling disinformation
Detailing the communications between Britain and Russia in the immediate aftermath of Salisbury, Allen said Russia sent an “extraordinary number” of note verbale — formal diplomatic communications — to the U.K. “designed in part sort of try and overwhelm [us] a bit.”
He said the denial-led Russian response to the incident was aimed at breathing life into conspiracy theories such as the idea that the poisonings were done by the U.K. to distract from Brexit, or to undermine the World Cup in Russia.
“The Russians don’t really mind if anyone believes it fully, the point is that there’s doubt, and then that becomes a win for them in their minds,” he said.
Allen said Putin’s personal comments about the assassination attempt were “extremely offensive and rather callous,” a view seemingly shared by Laurie Bristow, the U.K. ambassador to Russia between 2016 to 2020 who said in an email shown to the inquiry: “Perhaps VVP [Putin] should have quit while he was ahead.”
