Alex Salmond has refused to say that the Kremlin was behind the Salisbury poisonings and argued that there was only “very slight” evidence of Russian interference in US elections.
The former first minister, who hosts a talk show seen on RT, the Moscow-funded and state-controlled broadcaster, was asked three times if he believed that Russia was responsible for the attack on the former spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury three years ago.
He was accused of being an “apologist for the Putin regime” after repeatedly failing to directly answer the question. “I think the evidence is as it came forward but what on earth has this got to do with this Scottish election?” Salmond told Good Morning Scotland on BBC Radio Scotland.
President Putin of Russia has been accused of being behind the deaths of at least a dozen critics, as well as poison attacks against Skripal in March 2018, and the opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Russia last year. The Kremlin has always denied his involvement.
Salmond said that The Alex Salmond Show, which is produced with Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, the former SNP MP, is made independently by Slainte Media with no interference from RT. The programme is off air while he and Ahmed-Sheikh are candidates for the new Alba Party at next month’s Holyrood election.
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Asked again about Russian involvement in the Salisbury poisonings, he said only: “Evidence came forward as contested, I said it should go to the international tribunals and courts.”
Salmond added that it was “quite an extraordinary thing for another broadcaster to do who should be maintaining people’s right to freedom of expression and produce programmes if they’re independently produced and done”.
Skripal, 69, a former double agent, and his daughter, Yulia, became seriously ill after being poisoned by novichok, a military grade nerve agent, in 2018. Both survived. Dawn Sturgess, 44 and a mother of three, who was accidentally exposed to the poison, died.
Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democrat MP, said: “Alex Salmond was once hailed as the most effective politician in Scotland but has now been reduced to an apologist for the Putin regime.”
Stewart McDonald, the SNP’s defence spokesman, said: “Even Russians believe that Russia was behind the Salisbury poisoning that resulted in the murder of Dawn Sturgess. That Alex Salmond can’t see or say that plainly shows how remarkably low he has sunk.”
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George Galloway, the lead candidate for the pro-Union All for Unity, who has also presented programmes for RT, said that “the Russians that were photographed there” were behind the poisoning. Asked at his party’s manifesto launch if they worked for the Russian state, he said: “Well I don’t know who they worked for — you know more than me. But one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that Salisbury, Russia, and the Skripals is beyond the purview of the Holyrood elections. I’m basically retired from international issues now and focused entirely on Scotland.”
In his interview, Salmond said there was no evidence that Russia interfered in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and instead directed criticism at Barack Obama’s decision to urge people to vote against separation. He also pointed to a report that David Cameron, then prime minister, had asked Putin to back the No campaign.
In January 2014, Itar-Tass, the state-owned Russian news agency, said that Britain was “extremely interested” in referendum support from Russia in a report that was subsequently picked up by the Sunday Herald.
American intelligence found that Russia was the main foreign power trying to influence last year’s US election, in favour of Donald Trump. A special counsel inquiry had already found that Russia interfered extensively in the 2016 contest. Salmond said that the evidence of interference “was very slight and basically the examination was very slight” as he twice referred to Obama’s public intervention in the independence referendum when he said that the US wanted a “strong, robust, united and effective partner”.
President Biden has branded Putin a killer with no soul.
