here be gorynich

Today I hear gravitas laden suits talking about 'hitting back at Russia'. Cyber attacks. Eviction of diplomats. Freezes on money laundering.

The catalyst is the recent attempted assassination in Britain with a 1970's nerve agent approximating Novichok-6. The UK government are being tight-lipped about detail and not openly joining dots with any of the other Russian deaths in London.

I remember the Litvinenko polonium murder because I received a letter from British Airways afterwards. Turns out I'd been in the same seat as Litvinenko on a different flight. In 2013 there was Putin opposer Boris Berezovsky, found hanged in London. As recently as Monday there was Russian exile Nikolai Glushkov, found dead with apparent strangulation marks in a house in New Malden.

Putin isn't saying anything about the specifics, although his view of defectors is well-reported. He uses these situations to amplify his 'dark power' ahead of the upcoming elections.

If a nerve agent was used in Salisbury, it is despite the 1990 Chemical Weapons Convention. Russia continued experiments and production, often under the guise of insecticides.

The nerve agents use binary combinations, amalgamating the main agent with phosphorus derivatives or iso-propyl alcohol to drastically increase the potency of these so-called newcomer weapons. The Russian Khimprom plant in Volgograd is a potential manufacturing site, although such a tiny amount was apparently deployed in Salisbury that it could have come out of a freezer cabinet.

Frederick Forsyth used a fictional equivalent in his Devil's Apprentice novel and there's similarities this time with the murder of Kim Jong-nam at Kuala-Lumpur airport around a year ago. A spray and a separate handkerchief. That was described non-specifically as a VX nerve agent.

The whole situation is wrapped up in spy defections, friends of Putin and the free-ranging oligarchs who have sliced money from every state-owned industry in Russia and deposited the huge proceeds in a blend of laundered and generally tax free situations. It's all companies within companies and houses within houses, like Russian dolls stretched to infinity. The finance industry has been only to pleased to help. My own guidance is that offices of banks in Mayfair instead of Canary Wharf may give a quick clue to the kind of business being conducted.

And meanwhile, Russia is having a competition to name their latest weapons. Gorynich seems to be leading the way at the moment. I think it means Dragon. Then there's the crucian carp. I wonder if Trump wishes he'd had that idea?