I watched this recent CNN documentary on the 2018 Salisbury nerve agent attacks. In summation what happened at its onset and as the film explains: on March fourth of that year, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were hospitalised after being discovered unresponsive on a public park bench in what was initially believed to have been a drug overdose and admitted and taken to ICU immediately where both wound up surviving, as opposed to the second similar occurrence on July eighth later that year wherein after spraying the perfume capsule hiding the deadly chemical was not so lucky. Three people were arrested in suspicion and with ties to the Russian president, personally, and for allegedly being who administering the chemical A-234 of the Navichok family of nerve agents developed under the Soviet Union's FOLIANT program onto the four firsthand victims.
The documentary makes the story itself largely irrelevant in actuality in order to make the matter as a whole about why one should find the formerly Soviet state of Russia untrustworthy under the autocratic and authoritarian regime of its president Vladimir Putin. Spliced between this being that of Wikipedia level general information on the chemical attacks, while the vast majority goes onto attempt to ingrain this sentiment onto the viewer and takes more time on that and the idea Putin has a wish to revive the USSR than it does on the case. Such is merely a half truth and a largely convoluted one given the Russian president himself has never actually stated anything explicitly to that matter, rather expressing a wish to reunify former Russian territory and where the populations already in most ways would be culturally, ethnically and linguistically Russian to create a new Greater Russia; stating to the matter himself that, while the collapse of the Soviet state was the, "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century," that, "Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains." With that and the convolution of things such as the Minsk Accords and various attempts throughout Putin's early leadership at merging with NATO which was humoured but with a look at the history, clearly never actually going to happen for need of a boogeyman and, who in reality, broke their deal not to expand closer to the Russian land mass first and even prior to the subsequent conflicts from 2008 to now with the current war in Ukraine.
Touching on the matter in light detail of Sergei Skripal himself being formerly a Russian military intelligence official who, in 1995 began working as a double agent on behalf of MI6 until the early 2000s. He was caught, tried and convicted in 2004, serving six years out of a sentence of thirteen years when he was released during a 2010 spy-swap negotiation-agreement between the West and Russia. Paired with the air of the whole documentary being the black and white pandering of simply 'Russia Bad' is an oversight of the West's own history of executing agents of espionage; and as a major example the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who where convicted of giving the USSR nuclear secrets and resultingly executed by the electric chair. Difference in this being of course, the two had been on United States soil in doing so while if Russia is truly the culprit as the suspects in the matter are of that affiliation with the 2018 scenario, crossed many borders in order to do so; however they are still only alleged crimes to their end and nothing has been set in stone yet as of 2026, two years shy of a decade later.
Obviously no two people, as with no nations either, are required by any means to get along. It does however seem a journalistic oversight not to be asking that if it ultimately proves to have been a Russian terror attack and with accumulated conflict with the nation, why said country is the way it is? Saying Putin was bullied as a youth and that's why he is how he is, as one speaker in the CNN documentary claims, really just doesn't cut it at all. Case in point being, the documentary ultimately fails in its subject matter for a focus on international polarisation.
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