A Russian toymaker has released a board game called Our Guys in Salisbury, featuring the same cities in Europe visited by the GRU agents accused of carrying out last year’s nerve agent attack.
Salisbury, the finish line in the game, is decorated with images of the city’s cathedral and two figures in hazmat suits. They are taken from photographs of the police response to the poisoning of the former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in March last year.
In one corner of the board is a spray bottle bearing a green skull and crossbones, seemingly a reference to the perfume bottle that British police said the Novichok nerve agent was transported in.
Photo: Reuters
In another corner are two illustrated figures resembling the suspected assailants, Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin. The two Russian intelligence officers were placed under sanctions by the EU on Monday for their suspected role in the poisonings.
The game was developed in November by the Moscow-based toymaker Igroland. The first images of it seen online were thought to be fake.
“I can’t understand, is this Photoshop or not?” wrote Dmitry Kolezev, a blogger from Yekaterinburg in Russia who published an early photograph of the game in November last year.
Another image of the box, posted online by a Reuters reporter this week, prompted new speculation over whether the game was real, but in an interview on Tuesday, two of the creators of Our Guys in Salisbury confirmed they had 5,000 copies of the game printed last year and were selling them online to retailers.
Mikhail Bober said he came up with the idea for the game in part because of the scale of coverage of the Skripal poisoning by the foreign press, and Western accusations that Russia was responsible.
“In some way, this was an idea of our answer to Western media: enough already,” said Bober, who joined Igroland last year. “To us it’s not funny anymore. It’s sad. This needs to stop.”
Asked whether he thought a board game about the Salisbury attack, in which one person died and four were hospitalized, would offend Britons, he said: “We didn’t want to offend anyone. On the contrary, we wanted to support our countrymen who might be offended by this situation ... a lot of things are said and a lot of it without any proof.”
An October survey by independent pollsters Levada Centre showed that just 3 percent of Russian respondents said they firmly believed the Skripals, and later Dawn Sturgess, who died, and Charlie Rowley, were poisoned by Russian officers.
The game also reflects how the response to the Salisbury poisonings in particular have been treated as something of a joke in Russia. The television station RT sent out chocolate Salisbury cathedrals as end-of-year gifts to other news agencies this year.
“If anyone died in Salisbury, then we didn’t want to offend anyone,” Bober said. “The idea of the game is a kind of joke, and a bridge of friendship. We aren’t playing around with the ideas of security forces or with poisoning.”
Asked about the images of hazmat suits, Bober said: “We just saw a lot of them on TV and decided to show it here. I think if we wanted to seriously troll and offend anyone, we would have done it differently... The idea was kind, to connect Russia with Europe.”
The game is one of several attempts in Russia to produce merchandise tied to the investigation and the media interest it has generated. Since December RT has been selling black T-shirts bearing the question “do you work for GRU?” for US$17.82.
It is a reference to a question by RT’s Margarita Simonyan during an interview with Mishkin and Chepiga, in which both appeared under pseudonyms and maintained they were traveling nutritional supplement salesmen.
Ultimately, it was researchers from the online collective Bellingcat who managed to unmask the two men as graduates of military intelligence schools who had traveled widely in Europe before the March attack in Salisbury.
The game involves players traveling as pairs through cities including Minsk, Tel Aviv, Geneva, London and Paris, all destinations visited by the Mishkin and Chepiga before Salisbury.
The game was released shortly before Christmas. Igroland did not yet have any sales figures, but Bober said he was considering making a larger reprint.
“If we rely on the PR that we’ve just gotten, we’ll make a much larger printing. We are businessmen. We’re thinking in terms of quantities and money,” Bober said.
Asked whether he would consider making other games about recent events in Crimea or the Ukraine, he said no.
“Definitely not about Ukraine, a fair number of people have died there, there are a lot of opinions and everyone has their own truth,” he said. “There are victims there, it would be stupid to use it in a commercial project.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not