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" "What remains extraordinary about the Salisbury poisonings is the seeming stupidity of it. How so? Novichok is, like polonium-210, a very expensive poison. The two murderers were sent to Salisbury with their poison bottle but with no regard to the simple fact of modern British life, that the country is littered with six million CCTV cameras, more units per person than any other country apart from China. Whoever sent the GRU officers is a fool. Reflecting on this anomaly – multi-million-dollar secret poison delivered on candid camera – makes me draw a harsh and, perhaps, novel conclusion about the Russian secret state in the twenty-first century. [...] The ideological power of Communism's appeal [...] is long dead; so, too, is its darkest enemy, Hitler; so, too, is the state that created the KGB. In its place you have the Russian Federation, an ethno-nationalist kleptocracy run by a pleonexiac with too long a table. The West should not be surprised that the quality of the servants of the Russian secret state in the twenty-first century is, frankly, a bit rubbish.
John Sweeney (born 7 June 1958) is a British investigative journalist and author who has worked for The Observer newspaper and for the BBC's Panorama television series.
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The 'conditioning' of the communist terror of the late Forties and early Fifties was so strong, so severe that it only required the lightest caress from the Securitate to have the average Romanian lying prone in a position of abject submission. Whatever liberal sentiments Ceausescu expressed in his speeches, the secret policemen were still present, waiting, listening, asking questions. There was no need for Ceausescu to clump heavy-handedly about, threatening people. It had all been done so effectively a generation before and people had not forgotten. The people barked to command, because they knew what happened to the disobedient. Once the dog is trained, there is little need for the whip.
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When Putin stole Crimea back in 2014, he ripped up the order established after 1945, secured by NATO and what became the European Union, that there would be no more land grabs in Europe. Putin, his 1970s secret policemen sunglasses blinkering his vision, doesn't get it that he is reheating Hitler's chip. The move was hugely popular inside Russia and that caused Navalny, always with an ear for the mood of the Russian electorate, a major headache. Side with Putin on Crimea, and Navalny would keep in with the Russian public but fall out with Ukraine and the international rules-based order; side with Ukraine and, he feared, he would lose relevance back home.