> Maybe I'm too skeptical, but this feels like a false flag thing to me. Why would you try to poison someone with no real threat to you and risk him becoming a martyr, using a method that immediately brings you to mind, with a nerve agent that is also strongly linked to you?
Russia assassinates even unimportant people for revenge and intimidation. For instance: they hired assassins to kill a bunch of nobodies in Ukraine in 2016 because they'd helped supply Georgia with Ukraine-made antiaircraft weapons that had been used against Russia when they invaded in 2008.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/world/europe/russian-assa...:
> Russia Ordered a Killing That Made No Sense. Then the Assassin Started Talking.
> ...The war lasted only five days and ended with a crushing victory for Moscow. But in many ways, the conflict was an embarrassment for Russia’s intelligence services. Years earlier, Ukraine had secretly sold sophisticated antiaircraft systems to Georgia, allowing for the effective defense that I had seen....
> For Mr. Putin — who has described Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” — it was an act of bloody treachery.
> “We don’t know who decided to deliver equipment and weapons from Ukraine during the conflict, but whoever it was, that person made a huge mistake,” Mr. Putin said at a news conference shortly after the war.