Why would Russia want to kill former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia?
Revenge is an obvious answer. They could also want to silence Skripal (but he likely gave the UK all the intel he had). Another reason is as a warning to other agents thinking of crossing the Russian government.
But what if some government, the UK, US, or other, wanted to incite action against Russia and turn world opinion against the Soviets?
The daughter has since recovered and is now in hiding.
Why? To protect her from another murder attempt? Or protect the people she might inadvertently expose as the real culprits.
If true the guilty party now has a problem; a living witness that was supposed to have been eliminated.
It would be embarrassing to the guilty party if during an interview Yulia let it slip the last thing she remembers before succumbing to the poison is some nice, middle-age British woman bumping into her and her father while walking in the park.
It would certainly benefit the guilty party to now isolate their surviving victim (witness) and reassuring her exactly what happened to her happened is the way they say it happened and not the way she believes it happened.
We believe these kinds of ideas when we read them in spy novels. The reason we do is because they're plausible.
* This is all pure speculation on my part.
“Why would Russia want to kill former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia?”
Glenn Beck called Jack Barsky, the Russian spy who became an American citizen after years under cover here. His take was that it was not Putin, as Putin wants to be the strong man in the world, not a pariah. Barsky thought the more likely scenario was an oligarch decided to do it on his own as a way to curry favor with Putin. But if there’s a backlash against Putin, it would put that oligarch in a tricky situation.
It’s all just so ridiculous.
I think if Russia had wanted to kill him to silence him, they would have killed him a long time ago, years ago, when he switched sides, to keep him from revealing information.
I think it is logical that he was poisoned now, just to try to cause trouble for Russia.