Lori Price is the editor in chief of Legitgov.org, Citizens for a Legitimate Government.

*****

Vladimir Putin is either very stupid or very clever.

Yes, I’m talking about the Russian affair again. No, not that one, the other one – try to keep track.

A nerve agent easily traceable to a Russian laboratory was used Salisbury, England to try to murder a Russian defector to the UK. The Russian apologists, hearing hooves, immediately cried zebras. Why would they use something so obvious? Somebody must be setting the Russians up.

Not quite. The KGB and its successors have a long history of committing spectacular murders of people they regard as traitors. Yes, they want to kill them, but they want to do so in a way that, even when they deny it, everyone knows that it was them, particularly anyone in their own ranks who was thinking of changing sides. It serves as a warning.

I should say they’re not the only ones to use this tactic. Gareth Williams, a young British spy was found dead in August 2010 in his bath, inside a holdall bag, that was padlocked closed from the outside. He was naked, but there were no fingerprints on the bag or the lock or the bath. There was no evident cause of death. Two experts tried 400 times to lock themselves into a bag in the same way, but failed. British police, in cooperation with MI6, concluded that Williams probably locked himself in accidentally.

But this wasn’t purely internal for the Russians. Sergei Skripal lived in the UK because he was swapped for Russian spies caught in the west. Going after him violated the rules that spy agencies normally stick to – he wasn’t theirs to kill.

The British have been investigating furiously, in every sense, and they were helped by the fact that the UK is the most highly videoed nation on earth. One fifth of all surveillance cameras on earth are in the UK, there’s one for about ever ten Brits, so it wasn’t too hard for them to find a pair of suspicious-looking Russians,