Russia’s poisoning of a former spy in Britain is part of a Kremlin strategy to divide the West by conducting covert operations and then fomenting doubt and disagreement over who’s responsible, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said.
A day after more than two dozen governments around the world announced the expulsion of 144 diplomats over the poisoning, Mattis told reporters in Washington on March 27 that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials of responsibility for what he called the “attempted murder” of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury cannot be taken seriously.
