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RT has released a full transcript of its interview with Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov named by the US as GRU officers responsible for the Novichok poisoning of a former GRU officer, Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
TRANSCRIPT (SOURCE):
RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan: You called my cell phone, saying that you were Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov. You’re Alexander Petrov, and you’re Ruslan Boshirov. You do look like the people we saw in those pictures and videos from the UK. So who are you in reality?
Alexander Petrov: We are the people you saw.
Ruslan Boshirov: I’m Ruslan Boshirov.
AP: And I’m Alexander Petrov.
MS: These are your real names?
RB: Yes, these are our real names.
MS: But even now, frankly, you look very tense.
AP: What would you look like if you were in our shoes?
RB: When your whole life is turned upside down all of a sudden, overnight, and torn down.
MS: The guys we all saw in those videos from London and Salisbury, wearing those jackets and sneakers, these are you?
AP: Yes, it’s us.
MS: What were you doing there?
AP: Our friends have been suggesting for quite a long time that we visit this wonderful city.
MS: Salisbury? A wonderful city?
AP: Yes.
MS: What makes it so wonderful?
RB: It’s a tourist city. They have a famous cathedral there, Salisbury Cathedral. It’s famous throughout Europe and, in fact, throughout the world, I think. It’s famous for its 123-meter spire. It’s famous for its clock. It’s the oldest working clock in the world.
MS: So, you traveled to Salisbury to see the clock?
AP: No, initially we planned to go to London and have some fun there. This time, it wasn’t a business trip. Our plan was to spend some time in London and then to visit Salisbury. Of course, we wanted to do it all in one day. But when we got there, even our plane could not land on the first approach. That’s because of all the havoc they had with transport in the UK on March 2 and 3. Because of heavy snowfall, nearly all the cities were paralyzed. We were unable to go anywhere.
RB: It was in all the news. Railroads did not work on March 2 and 3. Highways were closed. Police cars and ambulances blocked off highways. There was no traffic at all – no trains, nothing. Why is it that nobody talks about any of this?
MS: Can you give the timeline? Minute by minute, or at least hour by hour, or as much as you can remember. You arrived in the UK – like you said, to have some fun and to see the cathedral, to see a clock in Salisbury. Can you tell us what you did in the UK? You spent two days there, right?
AP: Actually, three.
MS: OK, three. What did you do those three days?
AP: We arrived on March 2. We went to the train station to check the schedule, to see where we could go.
RB: The initial plan was to go there and return that day. Just take a look and return the same day.
AP: To Salisbury, that is. One day in Salisbury is enough. There’s not much you can do there.
RB: It’s a regular city. A regular tourist city.
MS: OK, I get that. That was your plan. But what did you actually do? You arrived. There was heavy snowfall. No trains, nothing. So, what did you do?
AP: No, we arrived in Salisbury on March 3. We wanted to walk around the city but since the whole city was covered with snow, we spent only 30 minutes there. We were all wet.
RB: There are no pictures. The media, television – nobody talks about the fact that the transport system was paralyzed that day. It was impossible to get anywhere because of the snow. We were drenched up to our knees.
MS: Alright. You went for a walk for 30 minutes, you got wet. What next?
AP: We traveled there to see Stonehenge, Old Sarum, and the Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary. But it didn’t work out because of the slush. The whole city was covered with slush. We got wet, so we went back to the train station and took the first train to go back. We spent about 40 minutes in a coffee shop at the train station.
RB: Drinking coffee. Drinking hot coffee because we were drenched.
AP: Maybe a little over an hour. That’s because of the large intervals between trains. I think this was because of the snowfall. We went back to London and continued with our journey.
RB: We walked around London…
MS: So, you only spent an hour in Salisbury?
AP: On March 3? Yes. That’s because it was impossible to get anywhere.
MS: What about the next day?
AP: On March 4, we went back there, because the snow melted in London, it was warm.
RB: It was sunny.
AP: And we thought, we really wanted to see Old Sarum and the cathedral. So we decided to give it another try on March 4.
MS: Another try to do what?
AP: To go sightseeing.
RB: To see this famous cathedral. To visit Old Sarum.
MS: So, did you see it?
RB: Yes, we did.
AP: On March 4, we did. But again, by lunchtime, there was heavy rain with snow.
RB: For some reason, nobody talks about this fact.
AP: So we left early.
MS: Is it beautiful?
RB: The cathedral is very beautiful. They have lots of tourists, lots of Russian tourists, lots of Russian-speaking tourists.
AP: By the way, they should have a lot of pictures from the cathedral.
MS: Your pictures, you mean?
AP: They should show them.
MS: I assume you took some pictures while at the cathedral?
RB: Of course.
AP: Sure, we did.
RB: We went to a park, we had some coffee. We went to a coffee shop and drank coffee. We walked around, enjoying those beautiful English Gothic buildings.
AP: For some reason, they don’t show this. They only show how we went to the train station.
MS: If you give us your pictures, we can show them. So, while you were in Salisbury, did you go anywhere near the house of the Skripals?
AP: Maybe. We don’t know.
RB: What about you? Do you know where their house is?
MS: I don’t. Do you?
RB: We don’t either.
AP: I wish somebody would tell us where it is.
RB: Maybe we passed it, or maybe we didn’t. I’d never heard about them before this nightmare started. I’d never heard this name before. I didn’t know anything about them.
MS: When you arrived in the UK, when you were in London or in Salisbury, throughout your whole trip, did you have any Novichok or some other poisonous agent or dangerous substance?
RB: No.
AP: It’s absurd.
MS: Did you have the bottle of Nina Ricci perfume which the UK presents as evidence of your alleged crime?
RB: Don’t you think that it’s kind of stupid for two straight men to carry perfume for ladies? When you go through customs, they check all your belongings. So, if we had anything suspicious, they would definitely have questions. Why would a man have perfume for women in his luggage?
AP: Even an ordinary person would have questions. Why would a man need perfume for women?
MS: Where would an ordinary person see that you have a perfume bottle?
RB: I mean, when you go through customs…
MS: Long story short, did you have that Nina Ricci bottle or not?
RB: No.
AP: No, of course not.
MS: Speaking of straight men, all footage features you two together. You spent time together, you lived together, you went for a walk together. What do you have in common that you spend so much time together?
RB: You know, let’s not breach anyone’s privacy. We came to you for protection, but this is turning into some kind of interrogation. We are going too far. We came to you for protection. You’re not interrogating us.
MS: We are journalists, we don’t protect. We aren’t lawyers. In fact, this was my next question. Why did you decide to go to the media? Your photos were published some time ago together with your names, but you were keeping silent. Today, you called me because you wanted to talk to the media. Why?
RB: To ask for protection.
AP: You say we kept silent. After our lives turned into a nightmare, we didn’t know what to do, where to go. Police? Investigative Committee? UK Embassy?
RB: Or FSB. We didn’t know.
MS: Why would you go to the UK Embassy?
AP: We really didn’t know what to do. Where to go? Hello?
RB: You know, when your life is turned upside down, you don’t really understand what to do and where to go. And many say, why don’t you go to the UK Embassy and explain everything?
MS: And you know what they are saying about you, right?
AP: Of course we do.
RB: Yes, of course. We can’t go out on the street because we are scared. We’re afraid.
MS: What are you afraid of?
RB: We fear for our lives. And for the lives of our families and friends.
MS: So, you fear that the UK secret service will kill you or what?
RB: We just don’t know.
AP: Simply read what they write there. They even offer a reward.
MS: What do you mean? There’s a bounty on your head?
RB: Dmitry Gudkov, if I am not mistaken, promised a trip to the UK to anybody who brings us to him. Do you think it’s OK? And you think we can feel just fine, walking around all smiling, talking to people? Any sensible person would be afraid.
MS: Why did you call me of all people? Why did you contact RT?
RB: We were reading the news today, your Telegram channel.
MS: Now I know people read it.
AP: You said it yourself. I don’t know whether I can mention this on air.
MS: Just say it. If it’s something we can’t say, we’ll take it out.
AP: “Let’s go, bastards,” you wrote.
MS: Oh, that. I wrote, “Go to the back of the line, you bastards” [meaning other media]. [This is a quote from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel Heart of a Dog.]
Funny questions. She does sound like a police interrogator.
Good questions though.
Well, she “outed” them, that wasn’t so nice ….
I don’t think they are queer . They are simply two aspiring businessmen who sell health supplements according to a report I heard. A previous question about the perfume bottle elicited the response that men travelling together would not travel abroad with perfume. The inference being that baggage searches might be embarrassing. No trained agent would be triggered by that inference anyway.
I have sometimes bought perfume on the way home for girlfriends, sisters ,requests from friends etc but never on the way out.
I can accept that they are both very worried as I am sure you would be in a similar situation. They will certainly not be able to travel anywhere in the world where INTERPOL arrest warrants are in force.
In fact any travel out of Russia will be dangerous now.
Well, if they are alone in foreign city, it is quite obvious that they do not feel like splitting because they could not agree to meet up anywhere because they do not know the environment.
Remind me ! Never go to Britain – other than for a connecting – flight.
The Brits could`n have asked for a worser interview than this, it`s poorly executed, in the light of the seriousness. They could have handed over all their pics from their phones, that would show their whereabout and timeline in Salisbury, their passports, tickets, restaurant/coffee shop bills. The interview leaves many unanswered questions….the Brit can for now, lean back and stick to their version.
They might still get that. The whole thing looked rehearsed, they had the questions before the interview.
Well, the questions were about the truth of what happened.
‘Did you poison the Skripal’s’ isn’t much of a curve ball.
Rehearsed? If they really are tourists then I’d expect they would have got their ducks in a row before approaching the media. Seriously, would you simply walk into a media houses office without any preparation and knowing what you want to say?
I thought the pair of them looked completely shell shocked as I daresay you would as will in that situation :)
why ? The brits can go kindly and f*ck themselves. getting down to the level of this morons can and will be brain damaging.
It was important to get the 1st interview on air. They were both asked whether they took photos in the Cathedral. The answer was YES and were happy to show them, so I expect more details, including School Friends etc etc to emerge in the coming days and weeks.
As for walking the wrong way I have often done that when I have lost my bearings and when there is snow on the ground its easier to get lost in new surroundings.
Yes, sounds reasonable. Lets see what happens the coming days.
Lol I walked the wrong way once when I was in China, my apartment was about 500m from the border with North Korea so I’m probably very lucky it was Chinese soldiers who turned me around :)
I was returned on foot to East Berlin via Check Point Charlie on a wet and stormy night in mid winter many years ago . The lights on the East German streets were sparse and dim. I took a few wrong turns and had to retrace my steps in pouring rain :)
I had entered West Berlin via Friedrichstraße station and spent the afternoon sight seeing locally as I walked to Checkpoint Charlie.
So what these dudes are saying is that they had a cell phone with them.
It should be feasable to trace that phone.
Publish the location data…
According to even controlled UK media, these two chaps are just gay tourists looking at antique stores. They hardly look like GRU agents, and why they should be carrying women’s perfumes?. The Brits are desperate to blame Russia for even the London gay mardi gras poor quality floats.
“They hardly look like GRU agents”. Oh, seriously? Do you know how GRU agents look? That’s most fascinating. Could you give a description please? (I believe there are strict rules on what an agent must look like, otherwise, how could you easily identify them?).
There is one old method to identify identities: Bring some folks, who know you in basic school. They omissed this old good methos. So not 100% sure, who these guys are.
We sure now know who you are
The Petrov-Boshirov version is just as ridiculous as the one given by the British authorities. Image 5 has them clearly walking past the Shell petrol station on Wilton Road, which is not in the direction of the tourist destinations they said they visited, or in any other sight-seeing area. It is however in the direction of the Skripal house, roughly 700 m. from it. And yet the timestamps given by the Metropolitan police are fabricated, so I have to conclude that both the accusers and the accused are suspicious in this case.
Tourists wandering around without a clue where they are going… yep, that’s never happened before….
I’m sure there are plenty of people who were within 700m of the Skripal house in that same time period. The UK regime flat-foots will need to do better…
From fake time stamps to fake alias’s to charges based on fake evidence, this whole UK fiasco is turning into theater of the absurd:
“The UK’s Metropolitan Police is confident that Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, whom London suspects of being involved in the Skripal poisoning, used aliases, the police told TASS, commenting on an interview the two gave to Russia’s RT TV channel.
“We are aware of the statements made to Russian media by two men today, September 13. As we stated on September 5, two men known as ‘Alexander Petrov’ and ‘Ruslan Boshirov’ are wanted by UK police after the Crown Prosecution Service authorized charges against the pair, linked to the attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey,” a police official said.
“We also stated that we believed they were using aliases and a European Arrest Warrant and Interpol Red Notices remain in circulation for the two men,” the official added.”
– Metropolitan Police confident Skripal suspects used aliases –
http://tass.com/world/1021488
If these guy’s stories hold up, that they are who they say that they are, and not the military secret agent assassins that the Brits are claiming. It’s one more nail in the coffin of British credibility. The British government is looking like Chicken Little and the Boy Who Cried Wolf rolled into one. They’re becoming the laughing stock of the international community.
With policeman of the world like this, who needs criminals:
http://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/78/590x/Tony-Blair-George-W-Bush-564774.jpg
The police are “confident” they used aliases? Why are they confident? Do they have ANY evidence whatsoever that these guys have used different names elsewhere, or are they simply ASSERTING this belief in order to remain consistent with the UK spooks BS narrative?
I’m plugging for the latter…
No, the time stamps may have been real—in fact, more likely than faked.
When they posted the photographs, I knew that they were real… but that they were most likely of some random guys, probably from Russia.
You are presenting this as if it were some high-fantasy story. No, it is not, it is a low-fantasy story. And most of the things are real. After all, if they are under pressure to provide any evidence, then it would be very foolish of them to try to make everything up. They need to present some “evidence”, so they they present something real—genuine mug shots, genuine footage.
But then comes the fantasy part…
Far-fetched claims of detecting Novichok in their hotel room and the failure of subsequent attempts to detect anything… well, they needed this link, so they pulled it.
They also claimed from the very beginning that they knew that the Russian government was responsible. Well, that set the stage for any future developments of the narrative.
When they got these 2 random guys, they published their names but stated that they were most likely fake names (yet they issued a Red Notice to Interpol and an European Arrest Warrant), then they claimed that they worked for the GRU, because, you know, “nobody knows who works for the GRU”, as they added.
Recently they have claimed that they had their identity confirmed by a Russian diplomat, who had been gathering intelligence on the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization, and that they recruited him several weeks after the supposed poisoning took place… no, after the poisoning supposedly took place—he was poisoned, apparently. Even though the circumstances look very suspicious, notably the timing of the incident, among other things.
So, they had it confirmed by some code-named Russian diplomat only “several weeks” later. And it took them almost a half year to discover these guys. Well, something does not add up.
Maybe they were so desperate then that they promised him some exorbitant sum of money to confirm their suspicions. The British are hardly to be trusted to be sensible in these matters. (Do you remember Curveball?)
And he probably simply told them what they wanted to hear…
I cannot imagine what he could have told them. Most likely not the real names of the so-called “suspects”, because the Britons would have discovered them immediately, and not after months of supposedly elaborate face-matching operation…
But it would make no sense whatsoever for them to use their real names. (If it were not the case, a traitor would have come up with a sensational discovery that they were fake names, as the Britons had hoped.)
In fact, it would have made no sense for them to use no cover if they were secret agents, travelling directly from their home country and not through some other countries, walking in broad daylight instead of dawn of dusk.
The Russians’ claim about the perfume was rather weak; in all likelihood, it would not have been checked by a customs officer because it was so small.
But… who would throw away a perfume bottle filled with Novichok into a charity bin??! Well, anyone who wanted to make sure that the bottle would be found and used!
Rescuing the Skripaľs was good for British propaganda, but the Britons still needed some poor victims to hype up the public outrage, so they targeted some human trash, as they undoubtedly perceived their victims…
And read this:
“We have carried out numerous inquiries in relation to the bottle and are now able to release an image of it with the nozzle attached. We are also releasing an image of the box that the bottle and nozzle were in.
We have spoken to Nina Ricci and undertaken further inquiries. Nina Ricci and our inquiries have confirmed that it is not a genuine Nina Ricci perfume bottle, box or nozzle. It is in fact a counterfeit box, bottle and nozzle that have been especially adapted. I’d like to reassure anyone who has bought Nina Ricci perfume from a legitimate source that they should not be concerned. It is safe.
We cannot account for the whereabouts of the bottle, nozzle or box between the attack on the Skripals on 4 March and when Charlie Rowley said he found it on Wednesday, 27 June.”
http://news.met.police.uk/news/counter-terrorism-police-release-images-of-two-suspects-in-connection-with-salisbury-attack-320534
So, is that how long it took them to produce it?
It seems like a load of nonsense to me. Why would anyone produce an alternative nozzle?? Because the original one was too leaky? How would it fit?
But throwing in into a charity bin… that sounds like nonsense. Also, there must have been still a lot of Novichok in there, or not? Where had it disappeared??
So, quite a few of the British claims do not add up.
And they did not expect that the Russians would use their real names.
The British theory seems to crumble, propped by outlandish claims in the hope to make a simple, coherent narrative.
As for their motivation… perhaps a push for a free trade agreement with the United States of Aggression?
There is quite a conspicuous collusion there…
I do not contest that some Russians may have attempted to kill him; after all, we do not know what Skripaľ was doing,.. his ties with Russia had intensified, maybe he made some dirty deals with someone there…
But the Russian government could have just waited until he came back to Russia… all they needed was to pardon him…
I think that most people would disagree that two passengers carrying bulky luggage down long corridors in a busy airport would reach the identical same location at the end at within a fraction of a second of each other. Under the circumstances there’s a much greater chance that it wouldn’t happen than that it would.
If these guys are supposedly secret agent assassins, purportedly using alias’s, then why are they using their real names as shown on their day to day government issued IDs?
“both “suspects” showed her their internal Russian passports …
“They showed me their [internal] Russian passports”
– Editor-in-Chief Interviews Skripal Poisoning “Suspects” –
https://sputniknews.com/world/201809131067992752-simonyan-interviews-skripal-poisoning-suspects/
Russian passports proof that supposed Russian GRU members using their real names? Interesting conclusion…
They’re internal passports that every Russian is required to have for identification purposes. Not international travel passports of the types usually faked to provide alias’s during foreign assassinations.
I know what passport is. The thing I can’t comprehend is
they are supposed GRU/GU (a state intelligence agency) members, Russia will make 10 different names with passports and bios for them if needed. Hell, you can even buy one with a name and photo of your choice. Also, RT is a state channel, you don’t need to have any passports to make Editor-in-Chief (Simonyan) say the words.
People are innocent until proven guilty. And right now there’s a lot more evidence that the two Russians are telling the truth and that the Brits are lying.
Oh for sure, they are innocent until otherwise is proved. My point is that you can’t take state’s secret agent assassin’s passport (internal or whatever) as something genuine.
You can’t?
They’re obviously using their real day to day identity and ID documents. Secret agent assassins don’t do that. They’re on international TV saying ya, we really are who we say that we are. Have you seen anything credible from an independent source disproving their claims? I haven’t.
But for you internal passport somehow guarantees identity.
It’s evidence that the Brits are lying. Secret agent assassins use disposable identity documents for infiltration and extraction. Not their national id that they use in their day to day lives for many years.
they don’t even look like them
Idiot… they look EXACTLY like them, though the passport photos released by UK regime are likely a few years old.
You seen an eye doctor lately?
Question for anyone who knows anything about chemical weapons and organophosphates like sarin and novichok.
Is it actually possible to