Putin has a shopping list of spies who must be killed

According to British Prime Minister Theresa May, there is evidence Russia has developed an explicit state-backed assassination program. In other words, Vladimir Putin has approved a hit list of Russian spies working for the West who must be killed, if necessary on foreign soil.

During the Cold War, Western intelligence agencies knew that defectors such as the Petrovs in Australia and Oleg Gordievsky in Britain might be killed by the KGB’s Spetsbureau 13, or “wet affairs” division, whose task it was to liquidate Soviet traitors.

That is why the whereabouts of Vladimir Petrov and Evdokia Petrova in Australia came under a D-notice officially requesting the media not to reveal where they lived in Melbourne.

It is puzzling to me why MI6 did not put Sergei Skripal in a safe house and furnish him with a false identity, especially after the death in 2006 of former Russian secret service (FSB) defector Alexander Litvinenko from radioactive poisoning by polonium-210.

One explanation is that during the Cold War there was an implicit understanding that when spies were exchanged — as occurred in the case of Skripal and three other Russians spying for the West, who were swapped for 10 Russian “stay-behind” spies in the US, including Anna Chapman — there would be no retribution.

This understanding is now destroyed, and any future Russian spies who are exchanged must reckon with Moscow’s death threats sooner rather than later.

That raises another question. Why did it take Putin’s assassination agent(s) so long to track down and attempt to murder Skripal? One explanation is that the Russians discovered Skripal was continuing to provide MI6 with intelligence that helped to betray the presence of spies in Britain and elsewhere. But it is difficult to believe his intelligence knowledge was still up to date and operationally useful after more than seven years in Britain.

As May observed, it may be that this attempt on Skripal’s life was undertaken outside of direct Russian state control. For instance, it is possible that the GRU (Russian military intelligence) on its own authority was determined to get even with Skripal. But who believes that this could happen in Putin’s Russia without his approval, as a former KGB operative? In any case, this still leaves the Russian state in illegal possession of a deadly nerve gas that it promised to destroy under the Chemical Weapons Convention, signed in 1993 and ratified in 1997.

A better explanation is much more crude. Skripal was convicted in 2006 under article 275 of the Russian criminal code for high treason in the form of espionage and was sentenced to 13 years in a high-security detention facility.

Skripal was a double agent who worked for MI6 from 1995 for more than 10 years and was alleged to have blown the cover of 300 Russian agents.

Putin was extremely angry about the enormous damage Skripal had done to Russia’s spy network in Europe, not least its penetration of NATO military secrets. In 2010, the year that Skripal was granted asylum in Britain, Putin declared: “Traitors will kick the bucket. Trust me. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.”

In other words, if you betray the motherland, we will kill you.

And therein probably lies the explanation for the attempted assassination of Skripal and his daughter Yulia. Those commentators in Australia who believe that Putin would not do anything so audacious as to damage the soccer World Cup in Moscow this June simply do not understand the Russian President’s priorities.

As his military actions in Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine demonstrate, he does not care about international opinion. What he cares about is his unchallenged power as the leader of Russia and his determination to restore Russia as a power to be feared.

British authorities are quite rightly inquiring into the sudden, unexplained deaths of another 14 Russian citizens living in Britain. They include Skripal’s son Alexander, who at the age of 43 suddenly died of a collapsed liver during a visit to St Petersburg, as well as Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

Yulia Skripal is no fan of Putin, criticising him on social media. Her visit to her father in Salisbury from Moscow would have enabled the FSB to track every movement along the way and in England.

Alexander Skripal’s ex-wife Natalia (who has remarried and lives in Britain) is also the daughter of a GRU colonel. And the mother of Yulia’s boyfriend in Moscow is said to have close links through her company with the FSB and does not approve of Yulia, the “daughter of a traitor”.

And so the Russian secret service plot thickens. According to The New York Times, Boris Karpichkov, a former KGB agent who defected to Britain in 1998, claims he features on a hit list of eight names — Skripal’s included — that he was made aware of on February 12 by a “friendly Russian secret service contact”.

Karpichkov says he initially dismissed the warning; he had faced death threats before. But after the Skripals were poisoned he has changed his mind.

There are some commentators in Australia who do not believe a single word of criticism about Russia running a state-backed assassination program and using a deadly nerve agent such as novichok. They seem to think that Australia’s handling of the Skripal affair, and Canberra’s expulsion of two undeclared intelligence agents, shows that we view our relationship with Russia as being of little importance.

The fact is that in terms of trade, investment, tourists and foreign students, Russia — whose economy is scarcely the same size as our own — pales into insignificance for Australia compared with China. Moreover, our reaction to the British intelligence evidence given to us about the attempted assassination of the Skripals demonstrates the government’s cold-eyed realisation that — as a former senior ASIO counterespionage colleague says to me — “same old, same old Russia”.

Paul Dibb is emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University. For 20 years in the Cold War, he provided ASIO with information about the Soviet embassy in Canberra.