https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/05/shadow-state-by-luke-harding-review-putins-poisonous-path-to-victory

This compelling account by the Guardian’s former Moscow correspondent shows how sowing chaos in the west has led the Russian leader to a post-cold war triumph

This necessary book starts, as it must, with the Salisbury poisonings two years ago: the attempt by Russian military intelligence, the GRU, to assassinate one of their traitors, Sergei Skripal. They failed but they did kill Dawn Sturgess, an entirely innocent Wiltshire woman, and for a time wrecked ordinary life in a quiet cathedral town. Ludicrously, the two gormless suspects claimed they had gone to Salisbury during a bitter cold snap – the beast from the east – to inspect the cathedral, “famous for its 123-metre spire”.

Then our weird but brilliant nerd army, Bellingcat, went to work on their laptops and scoured Russia’s open and not-so-open media sources, and through dogged deduction managed to out the real names of the two suspects, Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin.