A Ludlum-esque affair: What if it was Putin all along?

Here’s the thing

Now, let me start by confessing that this piece, unlike my previous ones in these columns, is not based on hard, ascertainable facts or generally known information. This is a figment of my imagination. The characters and incidents in this are real, but the rest is, well, straight out of a Robert Ludlum novel (although I’m not going to reveal the full plot developing in my mind). Blame my imagination running riot on Vladimir Putin, who announced last week that Russian scientists had made the world’s first vaccine against the Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2.

My conjecture: The world is blaming China for the worldwide pandemic, with the Americans saying that the virus is a man-made one, developed in a laboratory in Wuhan, released accidentally or deliberately. What if it was actually Vladimir whodunnit! What if it was Russia that had the virus, and the antidote ready, all along

A credible announcement of a vaccine against this damn virus is something the whole world desperately awaits each day. And this one came from the President of Russia, no less, until recently the core of a Superpower and even now a Great Power, including in its scientific accomplishments. And yet, nobody believed Putin. He must have hoped to shock and awe the world. Instead, it has turned out to be an embarrassment for the strongman, who only recently wrote himself a mandate to rule Russia as long as he likes.

Why did no one believe Putin? For one, the vaccine has not been put through Phase 3 trials. Worse, Putin’s vaccine is said to have undergone Phase 2 trials, with just 76 people, but Russia has not shared the data with the world. Confronted with this crisis of credibility, Putin did something truly in the style of the ever-suspicious Stalin. He had the very scientists who developed the vaccine given the shot first, and his own daughter, too. Everybody but himself.

Alright, you may say, Putin may not have the vaccine, and should not have sought glory by making the claim. But to then say that it was Putin himself who was waging the Coronavirus war on the world is a stretch, and self-contradicting, too. I completely agree. But consider the possibility that Putin’s vaccine actually works. Then, what is the probability that his scientists managed to make the vaccine in a matter of only months after human beings first came to know of the virus? And what is the probability that they actually already had the vaccine ready before the virus hit the world? Think about it and all that it impies.

Russia has a long history of developing undetectable poisons, chemical, radiation and biological agents. From the Soviet Union, Russia inherited a secret Cold War-era programme called Biopreparat, started in 1973 in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which the USSR had signed. Biopreparat’s 18 labs developed and weaponised tons of anthrax, ebola, smallpox and other agents, even ebolapox (ebola plus smallpox!). Most importantly, it also weaponised Influenza viruses.

In 1979, deadly anthrax spores escaped from Compound 19 in Sverdolovsk (now, Ekaterinburg), killing at least 66 people. Soviet officials had then said that tainted meat from the city’s black market had caused the outbreak of a disease that caused the deaths. Sounds familiar? It was only last year that American researchers managed – 40 years after the incident -- to put together the genetic sequence of the strain that had escaped Compound 19. It was a shocking finding: The Soviets had altered an anthrax vaccine strain to make it a vaccine-resistant bioweapon with just a few genetic changes!

But, does Putin have the ruthlessness it takes? Under Putin, Russian defectors to the West, especially his former KGB colleagues, have been regular targets of assassination, suspected to be directed from the Kremlin itself. The most frightening such incident occurred in Salisbury, UK, in 2018 when former KGB agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with Novichok, a deadly chemical nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and which was not supposed to exist in 2018. A spoonful of Novichok is deadly enough to cause thousands of deaths. The bid to kill a former KGB agent put the whole city of Salisbury and its nearly 50,000 people at risk of death by poisoning. But it did not matter to those behind Skripal’s death.

Does Putin have the motivation? Well, Putin, more than anyone else, has been driven by the idea of restoring Russia’s world status. The name Putin gave the vaccine – Sputnik V -- gave the game away. He wanted to recreate the glory of the USSR of October 4, 1957. Unfortunately for him, the world was underwhelmed.

Of course, as I said, this is all a figment of my imagination. Conspiracy theories are usually just that. And I hope mine is, too. But you can be certain that intelligence agencies around the world are thinking since Putin launched Sputnik V, and putting two and two together.

The Chinese have accused America of having planted the virus in Wuhan during the World Military Games there last October. Their ‘evidence’ – the US contingent performed so indifferently (for a grand medal tally of 0 gold, 3 silver, 8 bronze, to China’s 133 gold and Russia’s 51 gold) that “they must have been doing something else” in Wuhan. On the other hand, there is much evidence to point fingers at China, at least for the spread of the virus, if not its origin.

Srikanth Kondapalli, whose column is right below this one, has co-authored and edited an entire book on it.