Mark Urban - The Skripal Files

Yulia: Nobody will give you a visa.

Viktoria: Well that’s what I think too. If they give it to me, when asked if I’m able to see you, I need you to say yes.

Yulia: Well, I think no, the situation right now is—

Viktoria: Look I know everything and—

Yulia: Later, let’s talk later. In short everything is OK.

Viktoria: Is this your telephone?

Yulia: It’s just temporary, you know.

Viktoria: Got it. Is everything OK? You can see it on TV, you know, what the situation is like here.

Yulia: Everything’s OK. Everything’s OK. Everything can be solved, everything can be healed, everybody’s alive.

Viktoria: Is everything OK with your dad?

Yulia: Everything’s OK. He’s resting now, he’s sleeping.

Everyone’s health is OK. Nobody has had any irreversible [harm], I’m being discharged soon. Everything is OK.

Viktoria: Bye, take care.

Yulia: Take care.

It was a businesslike exchange – after such shocking events one can hardly say it communicates any great emotion. People though speak of Yulia’s reserve and self-control, and it’s clear that she and her cousin were not that close. Also, it might be inferred that they had already exchanged messages online, since the fact that Yulia is conscious and communicating hardly seems like a revelation to Viktoria. There is the uneasy sense listening to the recording and reading it on the page that both women have been deployed for a purpose by their respective sides.

Yulia, not using her own phone for it had become a crucial piece of evidence and presumably had to be decontaminated also, has been given one to make the call. She has one message, communicated nine times in a short conversation, that ‘everything is OK’. But she also tells her cousin quite plainly and without sentiment, ‘nobody will give you a visa’, that it’s just not going to happen.

For her part, Viktoria, after the initial surprise that her cousin can call, sets about trying to move things her way, and extract information: whose phone are you using; I need you to support my visa application; and what condition is Sergei in? Curiosity, particularly about Sergei, might seem entirely natural under the circumstances, but Yulia appears to suspect her agenda and keeps it all very brief. And of course Yulia was right, Viktoria was not going to get a visa.

The British side, from its monitoring of communications, and from episodes like Viktoria’s attempts to contact the hospital via us at the BBC, had come to its own conclusions. And Yulia appeared to share them. Whatever latitude she might earlier have given to her cousin, the recording and broadcast of their conversation was a stark lesson.

A few days later, on 9 April, and as predicted in the call, Yulia was discharged from Salisbury District Hospital and taken by her police guardians to a house not far away. It was a remarkable victory for the medical team treating her. Yulia issued a statement saying she was already missing the doctors and nurses as well as thanking the passers-by who had helped her and her father in the Maltings.

As for her relative, Yulia added these choice phrases:

I thank my cousin Viktoria for her concern for us, but ask that she does not visit me or try to contact me for the time being. Her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my father’s.

Set aside the damaged relations between states, this estrangement between the Skripals seems one of the saddest aspects of the whole affair. They were, after all, by the time of the poisoning, a family that had already been whittled down by the vicissitudes of fate. Viktoria would later bring Sergei’s mother more explicitly into the picture, saying that Yelena was distraught that her son had not called her.

What Sergei’s emotions must have been, once he became fully aware of the situation, one can only guess. But Russia was now deploying all of the means at its disposal to defend itself, casting doubt on the British version of events.

April passed slowly for Yulia: released from hospital, housed in a peculiar place with its government furniture and fittings, protected around the clock by armed police. Although she was out of hospital, taking blood and other samples from her did not stop. There were more conversations with detectives, and people who came to give counselling, help her through the dislocation of time, space, and expectation.

When she flew to London on 3 March she was in an upbeat mood. She would be reunited with her father, he was going through a tough time after Sasha’s death but she had put her Moscow life on hold to be with him. And she could give him hope, and take some for herself too, with the promise that there were brighter days coming.

She felt confident about her relationship with Stepan. Perhaps they would settle down. Yulia’s flat in Moscow was being redecorated while she was away, and she had put her beloved black mongrel, Nuar, into boarding kennels for the duration of her trip to England.

All her plans were derailed by the poisoning. Stepan was staying out of the public eye, not even contacting the hospital (though it’s possible Yulia may have got through to him after her release), and her father was still seriously ill in hospital. How could she return to normality? The Salisbury house was contaminated, a crime scene, being investigated by the police, and there was no way she was just going to jump on a plane back to Moscow. Her father still needed her, and of course the advice of those around her was that she would not be safe going back.

Little wonder that in a statement released on 11 April, Yulia wrote, ‘I find myself in a totally different life than the ordinary one I left just over a month ago, and I am seeking to come to terms with my prospects, whilst also recovering from this attack on me.’ She was well aware also by this point that the Russian state was asking for access to her, citing its rights under consular law to give assistance to a passport-holder.

The campaign for consular access, like the interviews being given by her cousin Viktoria to Russian media, were aspects of an information war that were intensely personal to Yulia. She must have resented this but she also knew that her future, inasmuch as she could see one at that moment, involved going back to Russia. ‘I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian Embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can’, her statement continued, ‘at the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them.’

Russia had hit on the issue of campaigning for access to the Skripals a couple of weeks into the affair. It was a way of simultaneously doing the right thing, in terms of looking after their citizens, while trying to find out more about their condition, and make the British look bad. But of course these appeals also played another role, as part of the international battle to set the narrative of what had happened. By emphasizing their inability to get consular access they could suggest the British were hiding the Skripals, imprisoning them even, as part of a sinister plot. Inasmuch as there was a coherent single counter-narrative – rather than many different ones – this version suggested the British had carried out the attack, with material made at Porton Down, in order to discredit Russia.

It is not always easy to distinguish the official aspects of the Kremlin information war here. For in the febrile social-media battleground there were rival claims from Salisbury ‘truthers’ or indeed their opponents, Putin-haters, that were quite unconnected to the official strategies of the Kremlin or Downing Street but might occasionally borrow a good line from them.