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Why Use a Novichok?
- ______- 6y agoPage requires JavaScript in order to view it entirely. Here's the Outline of it: https://www.outline.com/Re7Lvx https://www.outline.com/Re7Lvx
- ______- 6y agoOops, how ironic. Just learning now that Outline needs JS in order to work too. Ignore my link
- paulmd 6y agoa nice history of nerve agents that doesn't really answer the question in the title. why use a nerve agent that is easily traceable back to russia? same reason you use polonium that can be traced back to the exact reactor, to send a message. If you defect to the west then Russia will come after you.
- gustavo-fring 6y agoYes, it is state terrorism.
- FpUser 6y ago>"If you defect to the west then Russia will come after you." I suggest being more realistic. They do not kill just for being defectors. Majority of those do just fine. Many also visit back without much problems. But they sure kill those they want for whatever reasons.
- pessimizer 6y agoMost Russia talk assumes that we're talking about the Soviet Union.
- FpUser 6y agoI really doubt it. Got any link to back it up? And if correct then it is simply irrelevant as that country's been gone since some 30 years back.
- pessimizer 6y agoIt's irrelevant to reality, but not to anti-Russia theorists. Everything becomes a cold-war spy fantasy. The number of times the KGB is mentioned is insane.
- mrtksn 6y agoIs it really trackable though? AFAIK the argument is "Only Russia has the sophistication to create such a poison that we can't tell what exactly is, therefore it must be Russia". In hindsight, it seems like really good way operating. Russia has plausible deniability as it's not factually proven that it is them but everyone thinks that it is, therefore they earn notoriety points that can make other think twice before doing something that Putin might not like. Russia also gets mythical literature regarding its capabilities, which means that you can fear them as much as you like. It's intellectually fascinating that KGB and now Russa developed that almost magical substance. Odourless, colourless substances that are harmless and undetectable create extremely potent poison when come together. This creates an opportunity for drama that would give the chills in any spycraft thriller movie. Just imagine knowing that the target was tagged with one of the substances and will die once comes in contact with the other one. A substance that will do nothing to no one else but the tagged person, it creates such a tension. You can imagine the paranoia if this is an actual possibility for you.
- gustavo-fring 6y agoThis is a general strategy by Putin and his allies in the Kremlin. Google Gerasimov doctrine. It's very literally trolling.
- gustavo-fring 6y agoThe last time this was so much as mentioned in a comment on HN was 2 years ago (last story was 4). Seems like it isn't widely discussed but it has been ongoing for decades (Gerasimov's doctrine is from a Jan 2013 speech but it is Soviet and KGB tactics through and through).
- tazjin 6y agoIt could be because the person who initially posted about it has also said that he made it up from stuff taken out of context: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/05/im-sorry-for-creating-the-gerasimov-doctrine/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/05/im-sorry-for-creating-t...
- monocasa 6y agoThe thing though is that it's not super easily traced back to Russia. Other countries have for sure synthesized it, sometimes even in public literature. It doesn't fill that same niche as Po-210 where it can be traced back to the origin so clearly.
- celticninja 6y agoNone of those countries had a bone to pick with the target though. Russia had a very obvious motive.
- monocasa 6y agoWhat came out of it was Germany cancelling their gas pipeline to Russia. Almost killing the Skripals is a fair trade to some to give cover for that. I'm not saying that happened, but there's tons of motives you can find for those other actors.
- pantalaimon 6y agoThe pipeline is not canceled yet, but US sanctions make completing it a challenge
- oilbagz 6y agoSo the US is the one that stands to gain the most from this assassination attempt, then. How ironic.
- sideshowb 6y agoI don't think I've ever seen a lrb link that answers the question on the title. I stopped reading them.
- amelius 6y agoBut other countries will penalize them for it if they find out, e.g. trade bans, suspending foreign bank accounts etc.
- panarky 6y agoSame reason mafia bosses did barrel murders [1] or a mafia state would defenestrate inconvenient journalists [2]. To make it obvious who did it while still maintaining a thin facade of deniability. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_murder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_murder [2] https://www.npr.org/2018/04/21/604497554/why-do-russian-journalists-keep-falling https://www.npr.org/2018/04/21/604497554/why-do-russian-jour...
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoWhat a rabbit hole. I had no idea that one of the largest mass lynchings in the USA was because the mafia assassinated a police chief: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_New_Orleans_lynchings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_New_Orleans_lyn...
- dTal 6y agoDid you read till the end? It's not at all clear that it was a mafia hit. The whole thing was clearly stoked by a huge anti-immigration feeling. As you say, quite the rabbit hole...
- dkarp 6y agoI had no idea there was a word for throwing someone out of a window! Thanks for teaching me defenestrate. Now I need to find a sentence I can slip that into
- trefoiled 6y agoWhy would it be necessary to send a message that it was you who poisoned your most public critic? It seems unlikely that anyone would point the finger anywhere other than the FSB. While I personally do believe the Russian government is responsible, the timing of the poisoning, being so close to the completion of the Nord Stream II pipeline to Germany, and the connections between Bellingcat and western intelligence[1], should give one pause when looking into this specific case. [1]: https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-office-russian-media/ https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-of...
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoSeems like a really easy way for other countries to hide attribution for their attacks by using something that everything will believe is just Russia "sending a message."
- trefoiled 6y agoThis is more or less my assessment. It's important to keep in mind that global geopolitics is a subtle game, especially when intelligence operations are concerned; sometimes things are exactly how they appear, but often they're very different from how they are initially reported. It often takes decades to find out what really happened. I don't think there's enough solid information to draw any conclusions about this specific situation, but I do think if Putin intended to get rid of Navalny permanently, he couldn't have picked a worse time to involve Germany in a high profile poisoning case when a pipeline (to Germany) crucial to the Russian economy was due to be opened.
- takeda 6y agoWell... did it affect anything with the pipeline?
- trefoiled 6y ago>Well... did it affect anything with the pipeline? Yes. The US has been threatening sanctions on Russian businesses to stop the pipeline since 2019. The US finally issued the sanctions on ships involved in the construction, using the poisoning explicitly as a justification.[1] A great deal of pressure was placed on Germany by the US to cancel it completely due to the poisoning, despite the several billion euros of investment already made by the country. The German government did not give in to the pressure.[2] [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/1/19/russias-gazprom-says-nord-stream-2-at-risk-after-us-sanctions https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/1/19/russias-gazprom-... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-politics-laschet-exclusive/exclusive-navalny-affair-no-grounds-to-cancel-nord-stream-pipeline-new-german-cdu-chief-says-idUSKBN2A51FL https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-politics-laschet-... Edit: The US did not explicitly sanction entities involved in the construction of the pipeline because of Navalny, I got that mixed up with a European parliament push to do so. [3] [3] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20210119IPR95904/parliament-demands-significantly-tighter-eu-sanctions-against-russia https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20210119IP...
- cwmma 6y agoThey do at the end 1. it allows the assassins do get away since there is a delay compared to a gun 2. it's formally deniable 3. it's informally obvious who did it 4. the people in charge of doing the killings are also in charge of the development of it, so it might have been easy for them to get access
- feralimal 6y agoIt doesn't really do that though. Its like tracing servers back to North Korea or Russia. It certainly allows someone at a glance to think they know what they are doing, as if 3 letter agencies are incapable of making something look incriminating.
- xkcd-sucks 6y ago> easily traceable back to russia Maybe "associated with Russia in popular media" - which is a bit of a tautology - But the structures of these are public, they're simple chemistry, and even if it's an "undocumented" one you really have to work to make organophosphates that aren't deadly at low concentrations. Basically any country with a minimal chemical industry could synthesize it - Even a contract manufacturer told it's a "deadly research pesticide which you shouldn't touch"
- igammarays 6y agoRather than asking why use Novichok, one should be asking why Navalny did not actually die if Novichok was used (or why the job was not finished if the first attempt failed). As Putin said quite convincingly in his end of year address: if we wanted Navalny dead, he would be dead already. The only reason to claim that Novichok was used would be to point a finger at Russia, which serves Western interests quite well.
- andyxor 6y agoNovichok is equivalent of public execution, to deter individuals from defying authority of the state, it's a terror tactic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_execution
- rsync 6y agoAs always when the LRB comes up on HN ... Please subscribe in some capacity to the LRB - they are, perhaps, the best print periodical on the planet right now (perhaps neck and neck with The New Yorker) and have great coverage across a broad range of international issues.
- MomoXenosaga 6y agoMy theory is that the Russian ruling class are quite literally mad dogs who don't even care about their own country and only about their own wealth. See people like Khadaffi and Idi Amin.
- jsiepkes 6y agoGaddafi wasn't some saint but saying he had the same motives as Idi Amin is somewhat ignorant of history. Gaddafi was mostly driven by trying to strength African and Arab unity to better stand up to western countries. He attempted to create a unified Arab state by merging Libya, Egypt and Syria. After that failed he set his sights on trying to create a more unified Africa. I can't find anything that Gaddafi was in it for personal power like Amin was.
- monocasa 6y agoI do think that's true for a lot of Russian oligarchs, but I'm not sure you can paint with such a wide brush on Putin himself. Not out of any altruism, but because he sees Russia itself as part of his wealth and wants it to be looked after well in that context.
- davidw 6y agoThe final paragraph answers the question: > Why choose a nerve agent over a hail of bullets, as used in the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, probably by Israel, in November? The logic behind using nerve agents in the Skripal and Navalny cases was that the target could be poisoned through contact with their own belongings, a method that allowed the would-be killers to operate at a safe distance. The death would be formally deniable but the result plain enough to send a message. In both cases the plot ran into the classic problem for assassins: the difficulty of actually killing the victim. It’s surprisingly common for people to survive assassination attempts, particularly when single gunshots or explosives are used. The recent record of attempted nerve agent assassinations leads to the suspicion that they, too, are a poor choice of weapon. Contrary to popular belief, they aren’t always fatal, since they aren’t quickly absorbed through the skin (death is quicker if they’re inhaled, or enter through the eyes). They’re expensive to produce and their effects can be treated with atropine. In this respect they aren’t a dramatic improvement over traditional poisons: hydrogen cyanide, pentobarbital, potassium chloride – or fentanyl derivatives of the kind used in the attempted assassination of the former Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in 1997 – do just as good a job. A mundane explanation for their recent use is that the FSB unit in charge of assassinations happens to be the division that oversaw the old Novichok labs. They used what they had.
- type0 6y ago> ... they aren’t quickly absorbed through the skin (death is quicker if they’re inhaled, or enter through the eyes) Assassination of Kim Jong-nam used proved and tried liquid method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam
- simonh 6y agoRight, I suppose they sacrificed, or bypassed the "allows the killers to operate at a safe distance" advantage by having someone literally rub it directly into his face in public.
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- dvh 6y ago>It is still unclear why the German military never used them in battle Hitler served in WW1 and saw what chlorine does in the trenches. That's why he never used chemical weapons on battlefield.
- sofixa 6y agoThat and the fact the Germans had very little in terms of protection against chemical weapons, and if they started with them, everyone else would respond in kind.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]