Putin isn't Strongman of the World.

Russia is a superpower, a country that has enormous human and technical resources to prove simply it wasn't behind the notorious poisoning of ex-Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England. It has chosen not to, relying rather on verbal denials that nobody was going to believe. If Putin was going to wash his hands off the whole mess, he was going to need more than water, and he hasn't even held up a drop. Now even his most ardent supporters will need some convincing the Russian state wasn't behind this insanely stupid attempted murder.
And now, rightly so, Russia is being censured all over the world. Even President Trump has now joined the bandwagon of Russian bashing. Sixty Russian diplomats based in Washington and at the UN in New York have been expelled by the US and Putin should consider this remarkable, knowing he could always count on Trump as a faint ally, very few of which he has on earth. Indeed, Trump had chosen to tread a cautious line over the whole matter, refusing to blame Russia until more evidence had been provided. A lot of people felt the same way all over the earth, rationalizing that Putin and Russian intelligence were too smart to have embarked on such a stupid adventure. The Novichok group of nerve agents used in the attack could be so easily traced to Russia. This medium has even suggested a rogue scientist could have sold the formula to a rogue state or organization with an axe to grind against Russia. Putin and Russia itself has not done anything to encourage such skeptics and for Trump to have moved the way he did, it seems some materials very damaging to the image of the great nation of Russia is circulating somewhere in the labyrinths of international diplomacy.
The response is the same in Russia's backyard, Europe. Germany, France and Ukraine have also expelled Russian diplomats and countries like Latvia and Poland have summoned Russian ambassadors to their foreign ministries. According to them, in solidarity with British friends. A very natural thing to do. If such a brazen murder attempt could be carried out far away in Britain, only God knows what infernal plots could be incubated and hatched in these East European countries so close to Russia. But then there is something faintly grand about that line about solidarity. Ukraine has suffered enormously at the hands of Russia, what with the annexation of Crimea and the switching on and off of gas pipelines from Russia at will by GAZPROM. This is certainly an opportunity to kick some ass in return by Petro Poroshenko. It is a kick at a bully that the Ukrainian president should deservedly relish and which Putin and his Russia deserve for now. He might be liked by his subjects in Russia but Putin is not strongman of the whole world.

Rex Tillerson: Serving God and Mammnon.

The oil industry where Rex Tillerson made his mark was a fairly certain arena. The newly-drilled oil-well is guaranteed to produce; new technology was going to make shale oil commercially available and the shady atmosphere enveloping Nigerian oil was always going to get cruder and darker. Only instability in the prices of oil was going to be of much challenge but that too wasn't exactly rocket science and for a man who had risen to the top echelons of his calling, he could be counted on safely to handle that. In short, the world he was familiar with was stable, rational, fairly predictable: always within his grasp. It was a place of gentlemen and handshakes.
So, it must have been a shock to him when he decided to switch jobs and throw himself into politics. Politics is a calling rough enough and American politics is a particularly toxic variant. It wasn't an arena for gentlemen, handshakes being very, very rare and fists in ample display and use and nobody was going to pull punches. And the most combative of the pugilists was the man he was going to serve as Secretary of State, President Donald Trump, a boxer who was going to play very unfairly, not hesitating a moment to punch below the belt. And the most volatile part of American politics would certainly be found in the State Department, in foreign policy. There he would have to deal with players even worse than his master. A place as stable as earthquake-engendered tsunami. An arena where the appalling Rohingya crisis could break out at any time, where Russian hackers and exterminators were going to cause trouble at any time. An arena filled with irrational souls as Mugabe, Kim Jong-un. A theater savaged by unpredictability such as the North Korean rascal making a volte-face and proposing talks with the US all of a sudden. Moments defined by not only not knowing when the next nuclear test will take place but also not knowing whether the missile was flying towards Hawaii, or flying over Japanese mainland or was going to end up shortly in the Pacific Ocean. Torrid moments of terrorists freshly abducting schoolgirls in Nigeria. Intolerable situations in which Turkey, a NATO ally would attack  Syrian Kurds, America's staunchest allies in the Middle East, and both the president and his top diplomat would be tongue tied. Tillerson was stepping into an insane world he was never prepared for, both by training and temperament.
A world that was perfect fit for his master, by temperament. Tillerson was supposed to be America's face to the outside world but it was an America that that gone Trump, a guy who was as brash and unpredictable and unrestrained as his worst adversaries in the diplomatic boxing ring. A chap whose remarks are often off cuff and whose most coherent foreign policies could be found only on his lips and tweets. It was eerily difficult imagining Tillerson as Trump's Secretary of   State. The Rasputin Coefficient was horribly non-correlative. Tillerson, in Trump administration, was practically serving God and Mammon at the same time.
Hence he would think the Iranian deal to be reasonable while Trump would savage it as nonsense. He would lay into Russia over the Salisbury spy poisoning while his president would be uncharacteristically taciturn and quiet all of a sudden. You would think that if the president was going to accept talks with North Korea, he would consult his secretary first. A dove, so to say, wasn't going to serve a hawk. Tillerson was more studied, careful, restrained than he was a pacifist but he wasn't going to do well in a regime stuffed with hardliners and of which head was a sheriff likely to shoot first before asking questions later.
Trump admitted he didn't agree with Tillerson on most issues. Sacking him behind his back was his most poignant testament to that disagreement.   

The War That Came in From the Cold.

It is just appropriate, very appropriate, that the poison used in the attempted murder of former Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, was a nerve agent belonging to the Novichok group. It seems the cold war has been resurrected  from its very cold grave. And with it the old, thunderous, East-West spy fiction. James Bond, Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth, Jeffrey Archer, John Le Carre... Check the name alone, Novichok, translated from Russian as newcomer. Only it wasn't a newcomer, the incredibly lethal chemical weapon having been manufactured by the old Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s. The same way there wasn't much pussy galore in Pussy Galore.
Honestly, it is difficult to tell at the beginning this wasn't fiction. A Russian double agent, a former double agent is the candidate for an extermination plot. We can still go along with the fact that the motive, or lack of it, simply makes the plot a very curious one. Sergei Skripal had been arrested and imprisoned by Russia for his treachery, had come to London as a result of a cold-war-style prisoner swap and has been living in his adopted country for a fairly long time without incident, save for the death of his son and wife. Deaths suspicion must now necessarily revisit. The common consensus is that he is no longer a valuable asset in the esoteric spy business. He no longer did active work for British intelligence and the access he had to secrets in Russia had long been blocked with his arrest. So why would Russia want to kill him? Why didn't they just execute him in the first place, when anger and outrage was still hot? Why now when his malfeasance has grown so forgotten and,  in fact, few remember him? Since it is fiction, we can still live with that and assume that the motive will reveal itself on later pages. We now move to the execution of the plot and this is where fiction, except extremely bad fiction, begins to fall apart. Fiction with its  smooth, seamless plots. It begins to crumble and hues of reality, cold, hard reality with its tangled contrivances begin to set in with its natural sloppiness. Even an amateur can see instantly that the execution of the plot is insanely sloppy. Why use an agent that could be so easily traced to Russia, a rare nerve gas that had Russia's signature sprawled all over it? Even more traceable than radioactive polonium, the agent used in the murder of Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko. Polonium, discovered  by the famous Marie Currie and named after her native Poland. Lethal it was but in all likelihood, it would have to be used in the open, air interference an issue, and there was simply no guarantee it would kill father and daughter at the same time. Even a rookie assassin would have done a better job. A murderer had left a trail of clues so wide and bright the great Sherlock Holmes or Hercules Poirot would have retired instantly.
All fingers now point at Russia. And even if this were a red herring contrived to embarrass Putin, Russia would still have a lot of explanation to do as to why such a deadly arsenal slipped out of its fingers.  But, in all reality, events emanating from the Skrikpal Affair are in the realm of conjectures and probabilities and it wouldn't do any harm to inject one now. Chemical agents have formulas, well-known to the designers. They are therefore not all that difficult to replicate. Former Soviet scientists have not been well treated and, in fact, some have shifted allegiance to other countries after the break-up of the Soviet Union. What if a determined plotter is able to buy a formula from a pressed or disgruntled scientist? At least one of these countries has an axe, serious axe, to grind with Russia. What if this sordid affair emanated from such a place? We are not mentioning names, just unleashing the amateur detective instincts that all of us possess.
Nobody is exonerating Russia here. At least until the facts are fully unraveled. Indeed someone has suggested that Russia intelligence might be sending warnings to would-be traitors that perfidious undertakings have serious consequences and that no betrayer will be allowed to enjoy the fruits of his exertions, whether in the long or short run.
That would be a very silly thing to do. The opprobrium such acts will attract far outweighs whatever the intended benefits of security. Benefits that could be secured with less money and effort and image damage by plugging the loopholes traitors exploit. The image of Mother Russia has suffered enough with the annexation of Crimea and notorious, worldwide, activities of Russian hackers and it will hardly improve with the grotesque knowledge and imagination of coarse Russian agents sneaking into the UK, hiring cars and smuggling chemical weapons all the way to Salisbury. Just imagine the MI6 carrying out similar plots on British traitors in Moscow!
The whole affair has been a very poor plot and an even poorer execution, stuff of very, very cheap fiction, and if it indeed finally emerges that it originated in Moscow, it would not only cast Putin into serious infamy but would also go a long way in reinforcing the image of Russian agents in cold war spy fictions as brutal, unthinking, muscular spies.