As Russia was announcing who it would kick out over the mass expulsion of Russian spies over a nerve agent attack in Britain, the U.K.’s National Security Adviser Mark Sedwill was in Washington Thursday, conferring with Americans on next steps to check Moscow’s aggression.
“It’s mainly about a coherent approach by the Western alliance to a range of aggressive Russian behavior, of which the attack in Salisbury was just the latest, obviously a very acute example,” Sedwill said told a small group of reporters.
Britain wants to make its allies, including Washington, keep the pressure on Moscow after the attempted murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, on March 4. Two dozen countries including the U.S. ordered more than 150 Russian diplomats to leave their countries over the attack, and Russia mirrored that action on Thursday. Sedwill said this is the first joint expulsion of spies ever by a group of countries.
Britain targeted Russia’s covert intelligence network, not its declared operatives, like the British-based SVR chief or Russia’s chief defense representative, he said.
“We focused our own expulsions entirely on their covert intelligence network,” he said. “We considered that as the platform from which the Salisbury attack was enabled and other aggressive Russian behavior—cyberattacks and so on—are enabled.”
He said Britain is urging other allies to do the same, adding that the U.S. had already been considering similar measures because of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections and “other matters.”
The British official doesn’t believe the West’s expulsions of the spies will stop Russia’s malign behavior, but it’s a start in aligning international cooperation to teach Moscow that it has to follow international norms of behavior, or face consequences.
Russian President Vladimir Putin may not have authorized the Skripal attack personally, but in 2006, the Russian Duma authorized a campaign permitting the extrajudicial killings of enemies of the Russian state overseas. Putin extolled the policy in an interview with Russian state news agency Tass, and his interview was republished after the attack on the Skripals, Sedwill said.
“We think the western alliance as a whole has to stand together and continue to push back against this kind of hybrid warfare,” he said in answer to a Cipher Brief question. Hybrid warfare describes measures short of declared war to keep an adversary off balance.
He listed as examples of this behavior: the 2014 shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH 17) in the Ukraine by unacknowledged Russian forces; cyberattacks; use of mercenaries and use of militias.
“All are part of the doctrine of aggressive behavior, but operating below the level of armed conflict,” Sedwill explained. “We see this as part of a pattern.”
Naming & Shaming
British officials were careful to build their case first. Investigators determined the nerve agent was smeared on Sergei Skripal’s front door, which he touched as he left the house. It was eventually absorbed into his skin and that of his daughter Yulia. They left traces throughout Salisbury as they went about their day, before passing out on a park bench.
He said Britain acted quickly to both assign blame and rally international action, rather than waiting weeks or months for the British police investigation to proceed, unlike the assassination of former spy Alexander Litvinenko in Britain in 2006. UK authorities determined the former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Litvinenko was killed by radioactive polonium-210, believed to be administered in a cup of tea. After carefully building their case, they issued a warrant for the Russian suspect Andrei Lugovoi. Moscow did not comply.
This time around, Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee assessed Russia was most likely behind the attack after the British defense laboratory Porton Down determined that the substance used to attack the Skripals was a variant of the nerve agent Novichok known to have been weaponized by Russia.
“Whoever did it knew exactly what they were doing,” including how to handle the substance without getting ill, Sedwill said. “This is a chemical weapon only the Russian state has weaponized. There is no plausible alternative.”
Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May gave Russia a warning – and a chance to explain.
“We asked Russia for clarification on an urgent matter of danger to the public and of national security for the United Kingdom, concerning a serious violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and they provided none,” said a second British official in Washington, speaking anonymously as a condition of the interview. “Instead of engaging on the substantive concern, Russia has sought to confuse the picture with misleading arguments that willfully misinterpret international legal obligations.”
Sedwill said Russia also responded with a disinformation campaign at home and abroad, in which it put out two-dozen different narratives of how and why the attack happened, even blaming Britain for the attack as a way to damage Russia. Some of the narratives have gotten picked up on social media, and some on mainstream media, meant to confuse and redirect blame.
Britain is working to combat that with the proof it found at the scene, taking nerve agent samples to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. If the OPCW agrees that this agent likely came from Russia, then it could declare Moscow in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention it signed. The samples from the Salisbury attack are now being tested by international laboratories, with results due in a couple of weeks.
This does not mean London wants to isolate Moscow.
“That does not mean that we can’t, in due time, do business with Russia,” the national security adviser said. “The purpose of this action has been to re-establish that Russian behavior has crossed boundaries and we simply can’t accept it.”
One positive development out of the attack is the way Britain’s allies came together to take action, including the U.S., he said. “This was a very robust response.”
