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In Norway, a woman's boyfriend forgets who she is overnight. In Detroit, a man is arrested arrested but he was never at the crime scene. In Spain

disturbing pictures of young girls have appeared and no one knows who's behind

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The Guardian Archive Longree. We. Hello, I'm Luke Harding, the Guardian Senior International Correspondent,

and I wrote an article in 2020 called A Chain of Stupidity,

The Scrippile case and the decline of Russia's spy agencies which was extracted from my book Shadow State.

What drew me to this topic was that the sheer crazy fact of two Russian assassins flying into London arriving undetected, renting a cheap hotel

room and then going to Salisbury not once but twice to kill a retired former Russian intelligence officer who worked for Russian

military intelligence, the GRU, Sagi Scrippal, using Novichok, this rare lethal poison which they applied to the handle of his front door.

It's Lecare, but it's more than Lecare because there are sort of comedic pantomimic elements of this story as well.

The assassin, it turns out, were not very good. They needed two trips.

When they were caught and exposed by Bellingat, the online investigation agency,

they gave probably the most disastrous interview in the history of television

where they claimed they were tourists who had always wished to see Salisbury Cathedral's spire.

So I thought this story said a lot about where Russia was, its development as a spy state,

the cruelty and horribleness of its methods, and actually the kind of the weakness of European countries, including the UK,

when it came to dealing with Vladimir Putin. What people should think about when

they engage with this article in 2024 is that it was

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