This is an extract in translation from Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s blog in the Moscow Echo.  The original blog is available here. 

Who among us didn’t laugh over the last few days at the Sailsbury saboteurs and their idiotic superiors who issued half of the GRU’s staff with passports bearing almost identical serial numbers, as well as other conspicuous details which were brought to light by Bellingcat and The Insider along with a member of the Dossier Centre.

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about now.

I’m going to talk about Dawn Sturgess.  She died on the 8th of July, a woman with a far from simple fate.  A drug addict.  A frequenter of night shelters.  A human being with a soul and with her own feelings.  A woman who received a bottle of “Nina Ricci” perfume as a gift, which was found by her husband in a charity box.  For her this really was a genuine present.  It’s a rare opportunity that you can imagine yourself a woman who had received such a symbol of affection as her, that poor soul.

It’s an awful comparison, but there are terrible people who fed meat stuffed with needles to stray dogs.  But this is a level of inhumanity much higher than your average professional killer.

Here we’re talking about humans, not dogs.  And those… threw away a deadly poison with not so much as a second thought, without neutralising it first.  Even if it had ended up in a bin, rather than a charity box, the risk of death to the bin-collectors would have been immeasurably high.

But those… from the GRU headquarters on Khoroshovkaya street couldn’t care less.  Poor people are not human beings. I saw such people in prison.  Nazis, training to kill tramps and Tazhiks.

But those people in prison were just children.  Angry, debased and cruel, but children nonetheless.  While here we have a whole department of “special operations”.  The “Genshtab” Academy.  Officers.  Honour.  The “Dueler’s codex”.

Bastards.