Celebrations to mark the 100th anniversary of Russia’s notorious GRU secret service have been ditched after a string of cock-ups.
The once lethally efficient agency, behind the bungled Salisbury Novichok poisoning, has been ridiculed and was branded “unprofessional and Monty Python-esque” by a military expert.
The trail left by double agent Sergei Skripal’s would-be assassins Alexander Mishkin and Anatoly Chepiga in Salisbury in March humiliated the Kremlin.
The GRU has also left its tracks on the cyber-attack in The Hague as well as the hacking of the US presidential campaign, the German federal parliament’s network and prosecutors probing the shooting down of an plane over Ukraine.
Ex-NATO chief Hamish de Bretton-Gordon called Russia’s equivalent of our MI6 “inept, unprofessional and slapdash responsible for a series of debacles and almost Monty Python-esque.”
He said: “The GRU is in meltdown. There have been purges. Our intelligence agencies are watching with wry amusement at how bad they are.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin is privately furious with the Moscow-based GRU.
A former senior KGB officer said: “Putin was a KGB man – he always had his doubts about the GRU and this failed mission has only emphasised those.”
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