Putin denials mask dismay at ‘spy flaws’

Bloomberg

Beneath President Vladimir Putin’s angry denials that Russian spies were involved in attempted murder and hacking operations abroad, there’s palpable unease at the catalogue of sometimes laughable mishaps by his now-infamous GRU military-intelligence service.
Accusations by the Netherlands, the UK and the US that four GRU agents were caught attempting to hack into a United Nations body investigating a deadly nerve-agent attack on a former spy in England may galvanize the West into imposing further sanctions on Russia.
One commentator on Russia’s usually tightly-controlled state TV blasted the “incompetent” intelligence officers and said “the whole world is laughing at us.” While western nations often cast Russia “as a strong and vicious enemy, it’s not so unpleasant as when we seem like a joke,” political consultant Dmitry Nekrasov said on Rossiya 1 TV.
Even before the latest revelations, Putin betrayed his irritation with the performance of his spies. He took a dig at the alleged agents accused of carrying out the UK attack after his Foreign Intelligence Service chief Sergei Naryshkin —whose agency is traditionally in competition with the GRU—acidly observed that Russia couldn’t have been behind the operation because it was done so unprofessionally.
British police reconstructed the movements of two alleged agents using CCTV images that showed them travelling from London to the city of Salisbury where the murder attempt was carried out against the Russian former spy Sergei Skripal in March. Dutch intelligence broke up the operation in The Hague in April.

Hacking Charges
US prosecutors weighed in with indictments of seven GRU intelligence officers on charges of hacking and fraud including against world anti-doping authorities who’d exposed state-backed cheating by Russian athletes. They included the four agents in the Netherlands’ case and three other men who were also charged in July for alleged cyber attacks in the 2016 US election. Skripal, whom Putin denounced as a “scumbag” and a“traitor,” survived the poisoning together with his daughter, Yulia. Salisbury resident Dawn Sturgess died in July after she was later exposed to the nerve agent Novichok hidden in a fake Nina Ricci perfume bottle that had been thrown away after the attack.