Without reservation! No ifs, no buts!
When the British Government announced the fabrication that Russia had attacked on British soil with a chemical weapon called Novichok, Keir Starmer, then a Labour Party shadow minister, announced he was sure of the government’s evidence. The attack, Starmer said, “deserves to be condemned by all of us without reservation – without reservation”.
The evidence presented in the House of Commons by then-Prime Minister Theresa May was — Starmer told the BBC on March 16, 2018 — “the right conclusion, and for that reason, I think it is very important that we support the action the Prime Minister laid out on Wednesday [March 14, 2018].”
May had told parliament “there is no alternative conclusion other than that the Russian State was culpable for the attempted murder of Mr Skripal and his daughter – and for threatening the lives of other British citizens in Salisbury, including Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. This represents an unlawful use of force by the Russian State against the United Kingdom. And as I set out on Monday it has taken place against the backdrop of a well-established pattern of Russian State aggression across Europe and beyond. It must therefore be met with a full and robust response – beyond the actions we have already taken since the murder of Mr Litvinenko and to counter this pattern of Russian aggression elsewhere.”
Starmer repeated what May said, word for word. The Russian attack on the Skripals, according to Starmer, was “not for the first time. As a lawyer I represented Marina Litvinenko and it was my privilege to bring a case on her behalf against Russia for that atrocious murder ten, eleven years ago now. This is not the first time. It needs to be called out with no ifs, no buts. And we need strong action as set out by the Prime Minister on Wednesday.”
The Marina Litvineko case in the High Court in 2014 had been to press May’s government to go beyond a coroner’s inquest into the cause of the polonium poisoning death of her husband, Alexander Litvinenko, in London in November 2006. Instead, the widow Litvinenko and British officials wanted to close the inquest and instead open a public inquiry so that the case against Russia could be fully publicized, but the MI6 evidence that Litvinenko had planned to buy the polonium from Moscow kept secret.*
In fact, Starmer was not one of the lawyers representing Marina Litvinenko in the High Court review of January 21-22, 2014; the judgement was reported on February 11, 2014, here. Starmer’s name is also missing from the list of lawyers representing Mrs Litvinenko in the High Court proceeding six months e a rlier.
Starmer was more than big-noting himself on the BBC. The docket of Marina Litvinenko’s cases in the High Court reveals Starmer was a liar.
Slight reservation! Two ifs!
Donald Trump — in March 2018 president for the first time — was more reserved than Starmer. On March 14, Trump told reporters at the White House: “Well, it seems to me – I’m speaking to Theresa May today — it sounds to me like it would be Russia, based on all the evidence they have. I don’t know if they have come to a conclusion…But she’s calling me today…but Theresa May is going to be speaking to me today. It sounds to me like they believe it was Russia, and I would certainly take that finding as fact. As soon as we get the facts straight, if we agree with them, we will condemn Russia or whoever it may be.”
Now prime minister, Starmer will be meeting Trump at the White House later this week, as Trump is publicly signalling that he is re-evaluating the evidence of Russian culpability in the run-up to the start of the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine. The American ifs and buts have begun to count against the unreserved warfighting propaganda by the British.
There is also a hint from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, following his talks with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Riyadh on February 18, that the British evidence of Novichok is also being reopened behind closed doors.
Rubio was asked by a reporter whether his agreement to restore diplomatic operations with the Russians meant “that you consider the Skripal case or the Crimea annexation to be closed or no longer issues? Because I think – you mentioned Keir Starmer is going to be in Washington next week. I can imagine that the Brits won’t be particularly pleased by that.”
Rubio hesitated over how to answer. “Yeah, again, I’m not – yeah, I’m not going to negotiate or talk through every element of the disruptions that exists – or have existed in our diplomatic relations and the mechanics of it. Suffice to say that President Trump has pledged and intends to keep his promise to do everything he can to bring an end to this conflict. We cannot do that unless we have at least some normalcy in the way our diplomatic missions operate in Moscow and in Washington, D.C…we’re going to work with them to see what’s possible within that context.”
Washington sources point out that Rubio’s deputy at State, Michael Waltz’s deputy at the National Security Council (NSC), and the new appointees at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Pentagon are all special operations warfighters against Russia. They know the Skripal case and the Novichok story have been operations of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Ministry of Defence’s chemical warfare branch. What they and Rubio didn’t know a week ago is what Trump will answer when Starmer asks him to continue the spetsnaz war against Russia.
THE NEW TRUMP SPETSNAZ WARFIGHTERS AGAINST RUSSIA
Left to right: Louis Bono, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and the UK since January 20; formerly the chief US agent in charge of anti-Russia operations in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan; Sebastian Gorka, Deputy Assistant to the President and senior director at the National Security Council for special operations (aka counterterrorism); USAF Lieutenant General (retired) John Daniel Caine, who directed spetsnaz operations for the Air Force in 2008-2010; 2016-2019; and at the CIA from 2021 to 2024. Caine’s responsibility covered US operations in Syria from the Al-Tanf base; the assassination in Baghdad of Iranian Major General General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, and the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September 2022. Extreme right: USAF Major (retired) Michael Jensen, newly appointed supervisor of special operations at the Pentagon.
Washington sources caution against seeing these men as pro-British. “Trump,” confides one of the sources off the record, “has the classic problem of a politician who is afraid that the generals and special operations gunmen in his military are capable of organizing a putsch against him. So Trump must appoint a new gang of gunmen to root that risk out. It will take him months to do this. All the while Trump is bound to think the British are capable of collaborating in a putsch against him, just as Trump believes MI6 was engaged through Christopher Steele in helping Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016.”
This was the High Court ruling of February 1, 2024, dismissing Trump’s libel lawsuit against Christopher Steele and his Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. This London court action followed the failure of Trump and his lawyers to sue Steele in US District Court in Florida for conspiracy to injure him with the lies contained in the Steele Dossier; that claim was dismissed in September 2022. For analysis of the Steele Dossier, read this.
The Washington sources warn that Starmer’s record as a Russia warfighter will trigger a reaction from Trump if the President suspects the Prime Minister is acting disloyally or threateningly – again.
STARMER’S RECORD AS WARFIGHTER AGAINST RUSSIA, MARCH 2018, MARCH 2022, FEBRUARY 2025
Source: https://twitter.com/bbcquestiontime/
Source: https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nyFA2NX7Ck
On February 16, Starmer placed a declaration in The Telegraph that he is “ready and willing to contribute to security guarantees to Ukraine by putting our own troops on the ground if necessary”.
Starmer’s conditional “if necessary” drew an explicit rejection by Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov the next day in Riyadh. Identifying the UK as an enemy state at war with Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield, and in directing missile attacks on the Russian hinterland, Lavrov declared: “the appearance of troops of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a foreign flag, under the flag of the European Union, or under national flags in this regard does not change anything. This is unacceptable to us.”
Washington sources claim that for Trump the key words in Starmer’s Telegraph piece are not the details of the end-of-war settlement, but Starmer’s readiness to accept Trump’s lead. “While European nations must step up in this moment — and we will,” Starmer wrote, “US support will remain critical and a US security guarantee is essential for a lasting peace.”
What this means, the Washington sources warn ahead of Starmer’s arrival in Washington on Thursday, is “loyalty. Trump is going to tell Starmer he’s not to operate independently without Trump’s say-so. There must not be a British candidate for president of the Ukraine; there must not be special British operations against the Russians which are not approved by Trump. If there are – if Trump suspects there might be — he will react strongly and publicly. Starmer will not be able to count on the US money, intelligence-sharing and coordination that comprise the traditional ‘special relationship’.”
Trump’s suspicion that MI6 and the CIA act in cahoots to deceive him is deep-seated. In March 2018, Trump said publicly that he was prepared to accept the official British allegation that Russia had carried out the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury. However, Trump’s wording was conditional. “As soon as we get the facts straight, if we agree with them, we will condemn Russia or whoever it may be.”
March 18, 2018 – Trump speaking to the press: https://www.theguardian.com/
A year later, in a profile by the New York Times of CIA Director Gina Haspel, it was revealed that “Ms. Haspel also tried to show [Trump] that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not the only victims of Russia’s attack. Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives…Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong [sanctions] option.”
“The outcome was an example, officials said, of how Ms. Haspel is one of the few people who can get Mr. Trump to shift position based on new information.”
The problem is obvious. The “new information” – dead ducks, sickened young children in hospital, British Government photographs – was false; the photographs had been faked by MI6. Haspel knew this before she briefed Trump. She then lied to Trump.
Seven years have elapsed since then: Trump now knows Haspel and MI6 were fabricating the story of Novichok. Starmer also knows that Trump knows the Novichok story is false. The Prime Minister doesn’t know how accommodating, how subservient he will have to present himself in order to avoid a public clash with the President over the Novichok truth.
[*] An MI6 source has said privately that his agency, the CIA, and the Russian intelligence services all knew that Litvinenko had been arranging to obtain polonium from Moscow. The Russians allowed the transfer because they believed they would then be able to expose Litvinenko’s London employer, Boris Berezovsky, as the mastermind of the scheme, and undermine thereby Berezovsky’s asylum status in the UK. The source describes that all three services were monitoring Litvinenko’s meeting at a London hotel for the handover, recording each other’s operational signals around the hotel. They were all taken by surprise, the source says, when Litvinenko spilled the polonium on himself by accident. The source concludes the British were able to capitalize swiftly, producing the propaganda blaming the Russians for killing Litvinenko.
