Corbynite far left fellow-travellers providing cover for the Kremlin

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has sententiously warned that we need proof before accusing Moscow of using a nerve agent in the UK or acquiescing or assisting in Syria’s use of chemical weapons against its civilian population a fortnight ago.

The BBC spoke this week to a man claiming to be a retired Russian scientist who helped develop the “Novichok” nerve agent that British laboratories and those of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international body monitoring this hideous form of warfare, say poisoned former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter last month in Salisbury.

But as Vladimir Uglev said: “You will never prove Russia’s guilt. Unless you can find the actual test tube that contained the actual poison.”

Watch what happens to Mr Uglev. Likely he will be labeled mentally ill or a paid traitor. One way or another – arrest, hospitalisation, an accident – he will be removed from sight.

Both Britain and the OPCW pinned down the nerve agent as originating in the USSR during the Cold War. Chemical compounds don’t have a “Made in Russia” label microscopically branded onto the molecules that comprise it. Any compound, including Novichok, is composed of the same sequence of molecules wherever it is manufactured.

What scientists do know though is that Novichok production, especially of the high purity used in Salisbury, requires facilities with extremely specialized, sophisticated and expensive equipment. Such as in the only place it’s known to have been manufactured in the former USSR and today’s Russian Federation.

Russia has long used poisons to eliminate awkward folk, and has even occasionally boasted about it. In Britain there was overwhelming evidence, accepted worldwide except by the usual suspects like Venezuela, Belarus, and Zimbabwe, that two Kremlin agents used radioactive polonium in 2006 to murder another former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko.

In 2004 the pro-Western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, who polls showed might win the Ukrainian presidential election in a race against Putin’s favored candidate, was poisoned, likely at a dinner.

He probably survived because he vomited after the meal and received weeks of intensive treatment at an Austrian hospital. The poison was identified as a dioxin called 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, made at one of only a few high-tech facilities in the world. One, of which was in Russia.

Yushchenko won the election but was left permanently disfigured on his face and body.

The Kremlin has assassinated lots of uppity Ukrainians. One of those was prominent wartime nationalist leader, Stepan Bandera, whose guerrilla forces fought the Germans and later Soviet rule.

Bandera, and another Ukrainian were killed by a pistol firing a cyanide mist. Initially both victims were deemed as dying from heart attacks. The murders were revealed only after the KGB agent responsible defected to the West and autopsies on the exhumed bodies proved he was telling the truth that they had been poisoned.

Russian intelligence, from its earliest days when it was known as the Cheka, has been almost obsessed with using poisons. It developed stealth murder methods from 1921 in “Laboratory Number 12”, also known as “Kamera” – Russian for “the chamber” – close to the Moscow headquarters of the KGB and its successor agency, the FSB, at 2 Lubyanka Street. Putin has ensured it is generously funded.

Former KGB General Oleg Kalugin, who defected to the US and lives in Washington DC, admitted supervising an assassination in 1978 where deadly ricin, provided by the Kamera, killed an anti Communist Bulgarian journalist, Georgi Markov, who worked for the BBC in London. He was injected by a microscopic pellet of ricin from a mechanism hidden in an umbrella.

Kalugin also told of a deadly Kamera-designed gel applied to objects handled by the target, such as car door handles and telephones.

Russian banker Ivan Kivelidi, who offended the Kremlin, died in 1995 after using a telephone smeared with poison. British police believe the nerve agent used against the Skripals was probably applied to the door handle of their home.

In 2002, the FSB did not bother to deny they had killed Chechen warlord “Khattab” by doping a letter with poison he absorbed through the skin.

After Chechen terrorists seized a Moscow theatre in 2002, FSB special forces pumped an opiate named fentanyl into the theatre that swiftly made terrorists and hostages unconscious. They shot dead 41 terrorists but 129 hostages choked to death when the FSB refused to tell doctors the antidote to their secret chemical weapon.

In 2004, two Russian opposition journalists, Anna Politkovskaya and Andrei Babitsky, were poisoned while trying to reach a terrorist standoff at a school in the provincial town of Beslan. Both recovered consciousness and survived. But Politkovskaya, who wrote a damning book about Putin, was later shot dead, her friends say on government orders.

A politician and journalist, Yuriy Shchekochikin, investigating corruption among Putin’s associates died from a poison his family believes was similar to that used on Yushchenko.

A western intelligence source says the Kremlin sometimes uses poisons instead of simpler methods like shooting when it wants the world to know it can murder opponents in a nightmarish and painful way. It just doesn’t expect anyone to dare to finger the Kremlin.

Shrieking “there’s no proof” as Corbyn did is an old Marxist fellow-traveller tactic that used to be routinely used to rebuff accusations about secret Soviet subsidies for groups working to forward Moscow’s agenda and to fracture Western society.

After the USSR fell apart proof emerged, during the short interval when some Western academics could delve into Soviet archives, that Moscow “gold” had indeed propped up Kremlin-friendly entities such as the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the pro-Soviet newspaper “The Daily Worker”, and other militant leftists who always blamed the world’s ills on the imperialist West as represented, chiefly, by London and Washington.

Corbyn, like so many leftists that previously worshipped at the communist altar, has seamlessly converted to respect for Putin. The far left continues the tawdry tradition of providing cover for Kremlin crimes.