Pod Insights British Scandal The Salisbury Poisonings | The Journalist Who Knew Too Much | 4 About this episode Guardian journalist Luke Harding was thrown out of Russia for exposing uncomfortable truths. Now he takes Matt and Alice behind the headlines of the Skripal attack, exposing how Putin's spy machine really works, and the chilling lengths it went to to threaten his own family.
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0:00 Alice Levine? Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of British Scandal ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.
0:14 Alice Levine? From Wondry, I'm Alice Levine.
0:16 Matt Forde? And I'm Matt Ford.
0:18 Alice Levine? And this is British Scandal.
0:31 Alice Levine? Matt, this has been such a gripping series. How have you found it?
0:35 Matt Forde? So many parts of this have been really difficult because at the heart of it is the human cost. Dawn Sturgis, an innocent member of the public, is murdered. She had absolutely nothing to do with Russia, and there was no reason for her to die. Then you've got Sergey and Yulia Skripal. They didn't deserve their fate either. This terrifying nerve agent attack, that they're lucky to survive. It really is, at its heart, absolutely chilling.
0:59 Alice Levine? Absolutely. I suppose the flip side to that, from a British Scandal perspective, is that it's also completely absurd. The goons appearing on TV, the fandom for the 123-metre spire, Vladimir Putin's ludicrous accusations that this was some sort of false flag operation by the British. It has all the elements that we love to get our teeth into.
1:20 Matt Forde? It does. And of course, our relationship with Russia is still something that exercises us today. It's more relevant than it's ever been. This leaves us wondering whether the Salisbury attacks were the turning point they should have been.
1:32 Alice Levine? Well, today, I think, is going to feel like a bit of a full-circle moment because I'm very excited to say that our guest is our first-ever guest on British Scandal when we covered the Litvinenko story. We are so pleased to welcome back Luke Harding, a journalist with firsthand experience of Putin's regime. He's spent four years reporting on Putin as The Guardian's Moscow correspondent, until he was expelled in 2011 for reporting that Russia had become a virtual mafia state. He's written nine books, including Shadow State, a gripping investigation of Russia's covert war against Western democracy. It starts, of course, with the Salisbury poisonings. You don't want to miss this conversation. Luke Harding joins us next.
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3:46 Alice Levine? Luke, thank you so much for joining us. If we can go back to 2007, what took you to Russia?
3:52 Speaker 04 I had a conversation, rather an enigmatic conversation, with my then-boss in Berlin, where I was working as the Guardian's international correspondent. And she just said to me, "We think you need a bigger canvas." And I said, "What does that mean?" And she said, "Well, basically Moscow." It turned out that no one really wanted to go to Russia. I thought I could do it. You know, I'd covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'd be based in Delhi, running around South Asia. I had a British wife and two kids, and we were versatile. We were good at languages. We're internationalists. I'd read Dostoevsky, Russian literature. I hadn't studied Russian. And I thought, "Okay, Moscow, big adventure."
4:33 Matt Forde? And the context of our relationship with Russia then was very different because the then-Labor government was actively trying to woo Putin and bring him in from the cold.
4:42 Speaker 04 Well, that's right. I arrived in Moscow in January of 2007, kind of icy. Rather forbidding city, thinking that Russia was a semi-democracy, which I think is what probably the Labour government thought at the same time, heading slowly but inevitably towards a more kind of liberal plural direction after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in fact, what I found was the reverse, was that this was a country going backwards, going back to the USSR, to a form of of control and authoritarianism, and also to a KGB playbook, where the spies ran the town and were kind of immune to law or what we would consider to be norms. It was a kind of darkening authoritarian state.
5:26 Matt Forde? And do you think there's anything the West could have done at that point to nudge Russia towards a more democratic future?
5:33 Speaker 04 That's an interesting question. I mean, I think possibly not. The problem was that there was a huge gap, which I could see, you know, working and living in Moscow, between what the Russian state said about itself and the and the truth. I mean, it said it was a democracy. I mean, there was a parliament, there were laws, there was a kind of facade of normalcy. But in reality, it was a secret state run by pretty kind of thuggish individuals. And and they had two projects. And one was to steal as much money as possible and to get super rich from oil, gas and other natural resources. And the other project was imperialist. It was it was expansionist. It was to restore
6:14 Speaker 04 what they regarded as a kind of rightful zone of influence, which used to exist with the Soviet Union, but included Central and Eastern Europe, included countries like Ukraine, Georgia, probably even the Baltic States and so on. And I sort of think that we, by which I mean kind of the UK, you know, politicians, government and so on, we were looking away. We were focused at that point on Islamist terrorism, on 9/11. And we didn't realise that Russia was changing. It was turning into something much, much nastier and something that would bring us problems down the road.
6:47 Alice Levine? Fast forwarding then to 2011, you find yourself deported by the Kremlin and blacklisted. Can you tell us about that?
6:55 Speaker 04 Yeah, we had a pretty torrid time in Moscow. I mean, I wrote a series of articles about top-level corruption. I mean, I posed the embarrassing question, how much money does Vladimir Putin have? I mean, our answer, he's the richest person in the world, although of course, a lot of this money isn't formally his, but he controls it. I also investigated the FSB, the domestic spy agency, which Putin used to head before he became Prime Minister and President. And of course, it was the FSB that had murdered Alexander Litvinenko, Russian dissident in London in 2007 with a radioactive cup of tea. And my reward for this kind of journalism was that the FSB broke into our apartments, they put bugs everywhere, they had video in the bedroom,
7:40 Speaker 04 we were told by the British Embassy. I was followed round by unpromising young men in dark leather jackets from time to time. All my phone calls were listened to. It was kind of on off. In other words, this harassment was not continuous, but every couple of months, something really unpleasant would happen.
7:58 Alice Levine? And did you anticipate that, Luke? Were you kind of expecting some kind of intervention like that?
8:04 Speaker 04 I wasn't. I mean, the British Embassy were quite helpful. I mean, they explained that the Russians, their secret police did this to British diplomats, to Russian local staff working for the British Embassy, to Americans and so on. It was an old KGB technique of psychological harassment, because if you can imagine, Alice, someone, when you're not there, going into your bedroom, putting bugs there. I mean, at one point, they even left a sex manual by the side of the marital bed, just to say that they were watching. And the goal was basically to make us leave, you know, for my wife to throw up her arms and say, darling, we can't take this anymore, let's go back to London. And in fact, actually, I had a kind of private insight into just how cruel and horrible this regime was. And
8:47 Speaker 04 my wife was quite cool, and so we made jokes and we carried on. And in the end, of course, they won because they cancelled my visa when I was flying back from London, put me in a cell at the airport and kicked me out of the country.
8:59 Matt Forde? I get the excitement of covering stories like this and being in places where the stories are happening, but do you ever worry about the risk to yourself or to your loved ones of covering these stories?
9:09 Speaker 04 What I found unforgivable were the threats or the kind of pseudo threats against the kids. I mean, the first time they they broke into our apartment in Moscow, we were living on the 10th floor of a kind of modern red brick tower block and our six year old son had an Ikea bed next to a badly designed window, a low window, which for obvious reasons we double locked and and came back after a dinner party to discover this window had been bust open next to my son's bed, you know, with a 20 metre drop to the courtyard below. And I reported this to the British Embassy privately and they said, look, yeah, they're just sort of playing with your head. We've got no evidence that they actually target children. But I thought this was unforgivable. What kind of regime
9:53 Speaker 04 plays with sort of primal fear of parents that something might happen to their children? And in a way, what I've been doing ever since, I mean, it's not exactly been revenge, but it's been more a kind of literary and journalistic journey to really tell the truth about this particular nasty regime.
10:12 Alice Levine? It doesn't feel entirely out of the playbook, the idea that there's no evidence that they would use children in that way. I mean, there's such horrifying things that they do do. So the idea that that would be beyond the pale is sort of laughable, isn't it?
10:28 Speaker 04 Well, it is. And if we go on to the war in Ukraine, I mean, obviously they've killed more than 600 Ukrainian children and abducted many thousands and taken them back to Russia from occupied areas. So there are few taboos, actually, for the Russian state and for its spy agencies. They feel they can behave like gods. They can decide who lives and who dies, you know, well, Roman empress, thumbs up and thumbs down. And there's a whole kind of mechanism, a sort of bureaucracy of death, where decisions are taken behind closed doors to punish certain people. I mean, what slightly consoled me when I was in Moscow was that I understood how the system worked and that essentially if you're Russian, and of course the Russians
11:12 Speaker 04 Think Ukrainians are Russian, then anything can happen to you. You could, you can be arrested or, or nothing, or you can be killed, or the tax police can raid your office and so on. If you're foreign, especially if you're a foreign journalist, the assumption is you're a spy. So, so you're a spy, Alice, you know, Matt, I, I'm a spy. We're all, we're all spies working for MI6. We're kind of James Bond. And so spies can be hounded and bugged and videoed, but generally they're not, they're not targeted. Having, having said all that, I was quite surprised to be deported. I mean, I was the first Western correspondent to be expelled from Russia, thrown out of Russia since the Cold War.
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13:05 Speaker 04 Our series is focused on the Salisbury poisoning. So take us back to the fourth of March, 2018. Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia collapse on a bench in Salisbury. What's going through your mind when you first hear about that story? I mean, that's a really interesting question. I mean, I had sort of two reactions. The first one was, I can't believe they've done it again, because I'd written a whole book about Alexander Litvinenko and his sort of teapot murder called A Very Expensive Poison. So I'd been going around the UK, I'd been speaking at literary festivals, I had become close friends with Litvinenko's widow Marina, I knew everybody from the world of the Russian
13:46 Speaker 04 opposition, who were, to be frank, were being kind of eliminated one by one. So my first thing was sort of surprise, actually, that they would do it again in this kind of brazen way. And my second, if I'm honest, was frustration, because I thought I knew everybody. I'd had lunch with Oleg Gordievsky, who was the most high-profile British asset, KGB officer recruited by MI6 in the seventies, smuggled out by British spies in the boot of a car in the mid 1980s, taken to Finland. He was absolutely top of the list of people the Kremlin would wish to kill. And Skripal, I didn't know, he was more or less at the bottom of the list. He was a sort of middle-ranking intelligence officer working for the GRU, that's Russian
14:30 Speaker 04 military intelligence, living pretty quietly in Salisbury, and I hadn't been to see him. But beyond that, I could see this was a huge story with international ramifications. I had a couple of messages, one, of course, to Russians, to anyone inside Russia thinking of collaborating with the West, or defecting, or talking to British spies, which was, you know, we can catch up with you at a time of our choosing. We will finish you when we want. A very kind of chilling message. But the second message was directed at the British State and the British spy agencies, and it was basically fuck you. It was fuck you. And it was kind of, okay, you take our traitors, but we will kill our traitors, and there's
15:12 Speaker 04 nothing you can do about it, because you're kind of weak, you're decadent, you're failing, we don't respect you at all. The doctrine of the modern Russian state under Putin is fuck you-ism. Really, the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal was the kind of ultimate fuck you-istic act.
15:27 Alice Levine? That leads me on to a question that I've been wondering about, about the method, about using Novichok, a chemical weapon tied directly to Russia's Cold War past. So are you saying that that was a message, it wasn't just an assassination, that was supposed to read as well?
15:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, what you have to understand about Russian spying is that it's not like in the movies, it's not Netflix, it's not immaculate, it's not especially clever, it is crude, it is demonstrative, it is even theatrical. There's something voldavillian about it, actually, that you send two goons carrying Novachok on a plane with woolly hats to go to Gatwick Airport, they stay in a quite crummy hotel in the east end of London in Bow, I've seen it, then they take the train, do a recce, meet probably with a third man in London, then they go back and they smear Novachok on the door handle of Skripal's semi in sleepy Salisbury. You know, the Russians are not stupid, they must have known that
16:24 Speaker 04 these two would be killers would be captured on CCTV, and the point is, they don't care. That's part of it. It is sending a message that we are the masters in this situation and we can do whatever we want to whomever we want, when we want.
16:42 Alice Levine? Because of course, we had flashbacks to Kovtun and Lugavoy from covering Litvinenko, and we couldn't believe how much history was repeating itself with the incompetence.
16:54 Speaker 04 Yeah, I had quite an interesting conversation with someone called Viktor Savurov, who's a former GRU officer turned author. He was saying, look, back in my day, the assassins were good, you know, they were trained, they were competent, they were professional, they were linguists, and these are just sort of mediocre provincial thugs. And to a certain extent, it speaks to the degeneracy of Russia under Putin, that it's not talented people who used to roam the halls of Soviet Foreign Intelligence, it's sort of loyal idiots with military training who are part of kill teams, diversionary units, they're given special tasks, and the special task that weekend was to kill Sergei Skripal.
17:34 Matt Forde? So Russia used Novichok so that the world knows that they've done it. But as well as doing that, through Russia Today, Sputnik and other avenues, they were spreading misinformation that because Salisbury was close to Porton Down, that in effect, Britain had done this to itself. And there were members of Parliament here that were getting up on the floor of the House of Commons and asking questions that seemed sympathetic to that theory. So do you think Russia had deliberately manipulated influential people? Or whether these people were just choosing to say that themselves?
18:04 Speaker 04 There's a famous phrase that Lenin came up with to describe communist sympathizers in the West, and he called them useful idiots. And I'm afraid, really up until, I would say, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there were quite a few useful idiots out there. Some were on the kind of hard right of British politics and some were on the far left. And they both found something rather attractive about the Russian state under Vladimir Putin. I mean, different things. I mean, those on the far left basically saw the Russians as sticking it to American imperialism. It was kind of binary. I mean, the Americans were evil imperialists and the Russians were defying American hegemony and trying to set up a kind of an anti-pole to US power.
18:49 Speaker 04 So certain people found that attractive. And on the other side, there were people on the hard right of UK politics who liked the idea of this strong, sovereign, white, Christian, anti-feminist country, anti-LGBT country supposedly doing its own thing. And of course, there was a common enemy in the European Union. I mean, Russia hates the European Union, wants to undermine it, supported Brexit actually quite extensively. So on either side, you had people who wanted to really understand Russia or give Russia the benefit of the doubt. And they were wrong.
19:23 Alice Levine? One of the surreal and memorable moments in the Skripal case was when the suspects, Mishkin and Chapega, or Petrov and Bashirov, did an interview with Russia Today, which went viral. What did you make of that bizarre press appearance? Do you think they were trying to convince the world genuinely? Or were they just trolling?
19:42 Speaker 04 I mean, yeah, I mean, it must be one of the all time memorable media performances when Petrov and Beschurov appeared on Russia Today. They were being interviewed by Margarita Simonian, who is a key propagandist, a key figure in the Kremlin propaganda world, probably the key figure. Look, what can we say? It was clear that they'd been told they had to do this, that they had to appear on TV. And, you know, their explanation for why they were in the UK was so risible. It was so hilarious that even Simonian couldn't stop laughing, where they said that they'd read about Salisbury, they were beguiled by its medieval spire.
20:17 Alice Levine? Easy now, that spire is revered.
20:19 Speaker 04 The spire is revered, but probably not in provincial Siberia.
20:23 Alice Levine? Probably not.
20:24 Speaker 04 And, I mean, my take on it is that, basically, I think it was trolling. It was trolling. It was, it's like, we're lying, you know we're lying, and we disrespect you so much, we're not even going to come up with a vaguely shiny lie, we're going to send you a kind of ludicrous in-your-face lie, and we're going to laugh at you. I think that's what was going on. I mean, there were terrible media performers. And I think, you know, one intriguing question we don't know about is, are they still alive? Where are they? I mean, who knows? But I don't think we're going to see them again.
20:58 Matt Forde? And from the Kremlin's perspective, was the Salisbury attack a success or failure?
21:04 Speaker 04 I mean, I think on balance, it was a success, actually. It showed that Russia was a big power with its own rules. And that even after Litvinenko, that the British state hadn't really grasped that or not sort of sufficiently. One other important point is that when we're looking at these events, we have to understand one fundamental fact. That fact is that Russia thinks it is at war with the UK and the West more generally. It's a kind of, it's a martial war, it's a civilizational war, it's a propaganda and informational war. Once you understand that they think they're at war with us, then you understand why they
21:44 Speaker 04 would send killers to roam around the streets of Salisbury with this deadly toxin. Otherwise, it makes no sense. It's surreal and bizarre. And it's actually taken a very long time for successive governments here to grasp that. We may not want it, but it's the reality is that Russia wishes to harm us and will use all sorts of methods to do so.
22:05 Matt Forde? And we know that Russia takes a dim view of NATO, of Western democracy in general. But what is it about the UK specifically that makes it target us?
22:15 Speaker 04 I mean, I think there are a couple of reasons. One is they are obsessed with MI6. They think the Secret Intelligence Service, I think they rate it as a pretty effective organisation. I mean, certainly Russian state TV is full of specials, documentaries on the work of British spies. They'll pick on some second secretary in the British Embassy and expose them on prime time. So that they really, they really hate MI6 and they regard MI6 quite highly. But the other reason is, of course, is that London, for a long time, has been a place which has been popular with Russian emigres. I mean, going all the way back to Lenin, who, before the Russian Revolution, used to hang out in the British Library.
22:59 Speaker 04 I mean, they're intrigued by oligarchs, by dissidents, by rich Russians who would live in the UK. They would recruit some of them, they would spy on others. We're talking about Skripal, but we haven't actually mentioned Boris Berozovsky, who was a Russian oligarch who was very close to Putin, who helped him become Prime Minister and President. They then fell out and he decamped to London in 2000 and then died in mysterious circumstances. Was found hanged in his ex-wife's apartment in Berkshire, five years before the Skripal poisoning. So Berozovsky really turned London into London Grad. I mean, he was campaigning against Putin from, from London. That enormously irritated the Kremlin. So, so yeah, they're obsessed by the UK.
23:44 Speaker 04 The Russian elites, the spies, they've all read Sherlock Holmes. They like Sherlock Holmes stories. And there's a phrase that's used on Russian TV to describe the UK. It's a sort of shorthand. They call it "too many Albion", "too many Albion", which means "foggy Albion". And when I was in Moscow, I tried to explain that the climate had changed. We didn't really have fog anymore, but no one was listening.
24:04 Alice Levine? That is such a good detail. Considering that Litvinenko wasn't that long before in relative terms, why wasn't more done to protect Sergey Skripal and his family?
24:14 Speaker 04 That's a very good question. We don't know the answer to that. There is an answer, but it's a secret answer. What we do know, or at least what we suspect, is that Sergey Skripal's handler, former MI6 handler, lived nearby. So in other words, it wasn't entirely by chance that he ended up in Salisbury. And certainly with high-profile Russian assets, there is, I mean, you can call it a duty of care, but I know that the security services keep pretty close tabs on these Russian emigres. They try and protect them. They check in with them. I mean, a lot of it is pastoral, you know, from time to time, they will go
24:55 Speaker 04 and have lunch with Russian assets, see if they're okay. And I think there are pretty big questions for MI6. Why did they not see this coming? I mean, we now know that the Russians had been trailing Yulia Skripal for at least a year. She would fly to London and there was a kind of very good-looking blonde guy who would start talking to her about her life. And of course, he turned out to be an FSB agent. In other words, there was a lot of activity around the Skripals in the run-up to this hit. And either it wasn't spotted, or it wasn't taken very seriously. I think ultimately, the spy services made a mistake. You go to Skripal's house, he's living on an ordinary kind of cul-de-sac with neighbors. There's no special protection. There's a big picture window. I mean, it
25:38 Speaker 04 was actually quite easy to poison him. And, you know, I'd be intrigued to know what the internal audit was, what conclusions were learned. I mean, one thing we do know is that for the other Russian emigres living in the UK, other defectors, security was immediately stepped up.
25:55 Matt Forde? In the wake of the attack, there were diplomatic expulsions and there was international outrage. But why was there such a lack of real accountability?
26:05 Speaker 04 I mean, I think there was a lack of real accountability because actually there was a fear of confronting Russia too much and a failure of imagination. I mean, sure. So Russia does something extraordinary, a warlike deed, which leads to the death of a completely innocent civilian who just picked up Novichok and died a horrendous death in hospital. And we respond by expelling diplomats and with words of condemnation, which is pretty much what the Russians expected us to do. And of course, they don't care. There's not going to be a legal procedure. Petrov and Bescher are never going to be extradited. They're never going to be in the Old Bailey, standing trial, jailed for 20 years. I think there was a kind of unwillingness, as I said, to kind of recognise Russia for
26:48 Speaker 04 what it is, this mafia state or shadow state, which is the title of the book I wrote about this whole case, and to respond accordingly with more than diplomatic measures. I mean, there were some sanctions, but frankly, I think the UK and other countries should have gone so much further.
27:05 Alice Levine? As you say, those diplomatic expulsions felt insubstantial as the entire reaction. But it must have been a blow to the Russian spy network.
27:15 Speaker 04 I mean, that's true. I mean, the Russian spy network has had some triumphs over the last 10 years, but there were setbacks as well. And certainly, really, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the sort of classic Russian intelligence officer network has been rolled up, not just in London, but also in Paris, Berlin and other places. But of course, the Russians don't give up. There's a sort of criminal energy about this regime. And so what they've started doing increasingly is recruiting third country nationals, you know, people who haven't got Russian passports. Sometimes they're Ukrainians, sometimes they're from Central Asia. Recently, we've seen this extraordinary spy case centred around Great Yarmouth, featuring Bulgarians working for the Russian spy agencies. So
27:59 Speaker 04 the Russians try and find a way, but their intelligence officers based in Kensington, based in London, most of them were cleaned out.
28:06 Matt Forde? You mentioned that Bulgarian spy ring that was recently convicted for spying for Russia across the UK and Europe. What do we know about them?
28:13 Speaker 04 Essentially, what we know is that they were recruited to spy on various people, including Kristo Grozev, who was a key figure in Bellingcat, the open source organisation, open source investigators, which more than anyone exposed Petrov and Beshev discovered their real identities as Mishkin and Chapega, and kind of publicised this around the world. So the two stories coincide, the Great Yarmouth Spies and the Skripal episode, there's overlap. And I think what it says is that, among other things, is that the G I U has a long memory, they don't forget, they don't forgive. And Grozev, who outed Petrov and Beshev, he
28:55 Speaker 04 ended up having to leave Europe, and he's relocated to America because basically he was told that if he stayed in Europe, he would get whacked. So this story isn't over. I mean, we're talking about one interesting and alarming chapter from 2018, but I can predict there will be further chapters ahead.
29:13 Alice Levine? So how should democratic societies respond to the kind of covert actions we're talking about?
29:20 Speaker 04 I think conventional international processes of meetings, of summits, of negotiations, of trying to find mutual solutions, they don't work. Putin's not interested in any of this. He sees that as weakness, as a way of dividing up countries and making gains. Where we are is really, we're back to a place of neo-containment, where we have to help Ukraine, of course, first and foremost, but also imagine that it's quite possible that Russia will attack somewhere else, either the Baltics, or Poland, or Moldova, if it prevails in Ukraine, and that its sabotage operations continue, whether it's cutting
30:01 Speaker 04 undersea cables in the Baltics, or paying moronic criminals to blow up, or burn down warehouses, or fly drones over military sites and so on, that this is a kind of rolling campaign of sabotage. I mean, we shouldn't be paranoid, but we should kind of be vigilant. And I think the most important thing is to call things what they are. So what we're dealing with in Russia is it's the world's foremost spy state, actually, where the spies are in charge. It's a fascist power in the 21st century, and it wants to chew up the European map and to restore the Russian empire.
30:36 Matt Forde? Do you think the UK is doing enough to deter the kinds of attacks that we've seen on Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal in the future?
30:44 Speaker 04 We've gone from denial about what Russia is to acceptance to actually realising that we have to change everything. I think Keir Starmer actually gets it that we have to spend more money on defence. You know, Russia isn't finished. I mean, Russia says it just wants to take Ukraine, but actually, I don't believe that. And I think most European countries don't believe that either. So we're in a new uncertain world, actually, also where we can't rely on America anymore. You know, America's been voting with Russia in the United Nations General Assembly and with North Korea. I think it's essentially swapped sides in the war in Ukraine. I mean, there are consequences of that. I mean, one is the UK has to work closer with European partners. Two is we need to spend more money
31:27 Speaker 04 on defence, on drones, on the military industrial complex. We might not want to, but we have to. And three, we have to watch out for more rogue episodes like Skripal, like Litvinenko. Yeah, the Russian spy network in the UK took a knock in 2022, but they haven't given up and they will be back.
31:45 Matt Forde? Is it too simplistic to say that had we been more muscular in our response to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, that Russia wouldn't have invaded Crimea in 2014? And had we been more muscular in our response to the attack on Salisbury, that Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine a second time?
32:02 Speaker 04 It may have given Putin pause for thought. It certainly would have been the right thing to do, to have, you know, shut the Russian embassy, booted out all diplomats, done massive sanctions, you know, barred Russian companies from listing on the stock exchange, scrapping the visa programme, which ran up until comparatively recently, where rich Russians could buy British passports in return for investments. We should have really taken newspapers away from Russian oligarchs, British newspapers who bought them. Chelsea, I mean, now it's gone. Roman Abramovich has been forced to sell it. But this is something we could have done 15 years ago. There were all sorts of measures we could have taken. And unfortunately, we didn't take them. Having said all that, I really think on Ukraine...
32:47 Speaker 04 That Putin has long been obsessed with Ukraine. And I think what was significant with Ukraine was the weak response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. And basically Putin, when he did the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he thought it would be like 2014 again, that, you know, first of all, he'd be able to take Kiev, you know, his troops would roll into the presidential administration, kill Zelensky, he could establish a pro-puppet regime fairly quickly, and the West would reluctantly suck it up. That was his plan. And I think he's been taken aback, both by the resistance, I would say heroic resistance from Ukrainians, but also that the relative robustness of the European coalition against him.
33:27 Speaker 04 But I think really by about 2021, he was going to do Ukraine, actually, he was going to do a big invasion. And by that point, I think there's nothing we could have done to stop him.
33:38 Alice Levine? Looking 10, 20 years down the line, what do you think Salisbury will represent? A turning point, a warning?
33:46 Speaker 04 I mean, I think Salisbury will represent a kind of chain, one of those kind of dark moments which really brought, or should have brought, kind of clarity to what Russia is in the 21st century. I mean, we could have reacted accordingly. We didn't want to because it was tough, it was tricky, it meant that we would have to make hard choices and explain them to our domestic populations. So I think Salisbury poisoning will be a symbol of what Russia has become. It's turned into a rogue state, shadow state, a mafia state, where it feels it can kill
34:24 Speaker 04 people anywhere, anytime, anyplace, and take advantage of our kind of weakness and failure to see things how they are. So, I mean, I think it's one of the kind of the most significant moments of, you could say, the post-Cold War, or the New Cold War, or actually the Cold War keeping going. But it was a very, very dramatic moment in Russia's struggle against the West.
34:52 Alice Levine? Matt, we have to get Luke Harding on more frequently than every four years. Tell me then, what are we doing next?
34:57 Matt Forde? Well, I don't want to upset you, Alice, because I know you're a huge fan of the royal family and you hate it when people gossip about their love lives, their failed marriages and their affairs.
35:05 Alice Levine? I absolutely do.
35:07 Matt Forde? So I'm sorry to let you know that this series has all of the above and much, much more. Royal divorces.
35:13 Alice Levine? Ugh.
35:14 Matt Forde? The tragic death of a much-loved member of the royal family.
35:17 Alice Levine? Have some respect.
35:19 Matt Forde? And a little beheading.
35:20 Alice Levine? Okay, I'm listening. We're going back in time then, I presume?
35:25 Matt Forde? No, pretty recent. I'm kidding, of course, we're going back in time to an era of treason, treachery and religious reformation. Next series, we're looking at the second of Henry VIII's wives and Berlin.
35:38 Alice Levine? In my opinion, too soon, tasteless.
35:45 Speaker 06 By 1779, Benedict Arnold had sacrificed more for the revolution than almost any other man in America. One of George Washington's most effective commanders, he had nearly lost a leg in the Second Battle of Saratoga. But in return, Arnold believed he had been humiliated by Congress and cheated of his glory by lesser men, so he decided to make them pay. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of the podcast American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US history: presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, Benedict Arnold turns his back on his comrades in the Continental Army and secretly defects to the British. With the help of his wife, he plots to hand over the most important colonial fortress
36:29 Speaker 06 to the enemy and doom the revolution he once served. Follow American Scandal wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. In the summer of 1881, US Army Lieutenant Adolphus Greeley and 24 other men embarked on an ambitious scientific mission to the northernmost reaches of the Arctic. But despite several triumphs of discovery, the men would soon face Tragedy. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of the podcast American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles and our dreams.
37:11 Speaker 06 In our latest series, after Adolphus Greeley and his men arrive at their destination more than 1,000 miles above the Arctic Circle, they get to work collecting scientific data and exploring the frigid landscape. But when resupply ships fail to reach them two summers in a row, they're forced to set out on a desperate search for rescue, and not all of them will make it home. Follow American History Tellers wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American History Tellers: Greeley Arctic Expedition, early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
37:53 Alice Levine? From Wondry and SamusDatt Audio, this is the fourth and final episode in our series, The Salisbury Poisonings. British Scandal is hosted by me, Alice Levine.
38:02 Matt Forde? And me, Matt Ford.
38:03 Alice Levine? For SamusDatt, our producer is Redzi Bernard. Our assistant producer is Louise Mason. Our senior producers are Joe Sykes and Dasha Lisitzina. Our engineer is Jai Williams. For Wondry, our senior producer is Theodora Leludis, and our senior managing producer is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondry are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne and Marshall Louis.
38:45 Speaker 04 A trucker merges onto the I-10 in New Orleans. He checks his mirrors. The lane is clear. And then, boom, impact. A pickup truck, seemingly out of nowhere, scrapes down the side of his 18-wheeler, multiple passengers inside. One man flees the scene, and the driver of the pickup, he doesn't seem all that upset. It didn't feel like a regular accident, because it wasn't. Across the city, truckers are getting sideswiped, all on the same stretch of the same freeway. And behind many of the cases is one person, a Hollywood stunt woman turned personal injury lawyer. Named Vanessa Moda. This podcast is a story about fake accidents that lead to real consequences and a scheme that ends in betrayal and murder.
39:30 Speaker 04 Listen to Over My Dead Body, Operation Side Swipe, wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
39:45 Matt Forde? For decades, two legendary brands fought for the hearts of American bikers, Indian Motorcycle and Harley-Davidson. The battle looked a lot like Coke versus Pepsi or Ford versus Chevy, but tastes changed and Indian didn't adapt fast enough. The icon all but died. Then came the con men, the dreamers, a string of spectacular failures that kept Indian in the grave, until one company finally got it right. This is the story of an improbable revival and the reignition of an old rivalry. Hey, I'm David Brown, the host of the podcast Business Wars, and every season we bring you the true stories behind the companies that shape our world. Indian's new owners are going all in, but an existential crisis looms. Can Indian and Harley recruit enough younger riders to survive?
40:28 Matt Forde? Make sure to follow Business Wars wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Business Wars early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
Previous The Salisbury Poisonings | Manhunt | 3 Next Anne Boleyn | To Catch a King | 1 Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated