I don't know if the US still does this. I'd be a bit surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if Russia still did, though.
I guarantee that they will have key people who have told them all their kinks, that they are really trying hard not to get rid of.
Russian internet has a field day(or a month already really) of jokes that the GRU officers, which all are undoubtedly, in the Russian mythos, true patriots and heterosexual macho made in the image of the Putin himself, would carry out every order for the Motherland - to kill a traitor, to die for the Motherland, and even to truly practice homosexuality, all in the name of Motherland on the orders of "the comrade General".
The guys in the interview are obviously very bad at impersonating gays, and that follows pretty much the same outrageous "signature" style (the Russian saying is "sewn together using white thread" as it is very noticeable on any garments except white) as using "Novichok" and polonium (or assassinating major opposition leader right in front of the Putin's office windows) - all that is to make sure that there are no doubts about who really did it while of course officially denying any responsibility. Just like the signature killings by Mafia (which the Russian government in its nature really is) - everybody has to clearly understand who did it without the perpetrators and their bosses explicitly claiming it.
To the "the_grue" below - sorry, man, no offense, you just don't understand what you're talking about. Most probably you're just not a Russian.
Edit: you added that you speak Russian. Being a Russian and speak Russian are 2 very different things. That ridicule you see on the Internet is real, no doubts. What you don't get is that it doesn't make Putin ridiculous [deep] in the eyes of the populace and that it wasn't a failure [deep] in the eyes of that populace - and that is the main tragedy of Russia.
It also might be doubling as a public punishment for the spies for being sloppy. Putting them on TV like that is directly telling them that their careers are over.
If lucky, they might be transformed into celebrities, just for the annoyance value to the UK.
Is the international politics equivalent of telling someone to stop hitting themselves, after grabbing their wrist and whacking them in the face with their own hand.
I'm pretty sure you're reading way too much into it because you've been told Putin (and, by extension, his subordinates) was a great tactician one step ahead of everyone else. I never believed it and I don't believe it now.
Are you channeling H. L. Menken?
I think Putin is a comedian and two things I have noticed about Russian humour are firstly, always be deadpanning, and secondly, it isn't really funny unless someone ends up nearly dead.
I also think he is a good tactician but a lousy strategist and I don't think he is in charge of as much of the CCCP as is made out. He is the front man for a conglomerate of interests, many of which operate largely autonomously, and would cause him no end of internal problems should he try and reign them in.
This explains the sharp disconnect between the relative professionalism in the seizing of Crimea, while at the same time lending out SAM systems to idiots.
I'd also say there is a very good chance that Putin did not order this operation in the first place and is playing cleanup.
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edit - I think there could also be a lot of "Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?" going on.
It not being directly ordered is an alternative reason why someone so high up was doing this rather than a subordinate.
This could well have been showing off to curry favour, knowing that the target was in the regime's bad books already.
Being paraded on TV in the manner that they were after being uncovered, I think lends weight to this hypothesis.
I don't know who that is. But if I am channeling anyone, that would be R.J. Hanlon, who said "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." [1]
People are very good at acting dumb to avoid blame.
Hanlon's razor is a method of being polite, rather than a robust logical position.
Malicious compliance, being one example of this behaviour, even has it's own popular group on reddit.
Edit - for anything that consists of an established bureaucracy, you would actually do better to invert Hanlon's razor in most cases.
Edit2 - also, the entire premise is logically inconsistent, as it places idiocy and maliciousness as being mutually exclusive options, which they clearly are not.
In the first place, Robert J. Hanlon submitted the aphorism for the joke book collection "Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong". And, according to wikipedia, probably stole it from a Heinlein short story, so I suspect you might be taking it a little more seriously than Hanlon did.
That clearly didn't work in that case, did it?
> Hanlon's razor is a method of being polite, rather than a robust logical position.
Hanlon's razor is related to Occam's razor: in case there are two competing theories about the world, one of which is complicated and the other simple, always prefer the simple one. Neither is a logical argument, both are abductive heuristics [1] intended to produce the most likely explanation. Can it be played? It can, but it's even more unlikely, as that would further increase the level of sophistication. You can't rely on Hanlon's razor in a game of chess between two grandmasters, but the real world has a few crucial differences from chess, for example the fact that no player can realistically contain every possible interaction of their actions with other forces' actions. Which is why nobody is willing to bet on making such stupid and dangerous mistakes on purpose as exposing your agents, exposing your leader's lies and making your country suffer retribution for assassination on foreign soil. And for what? To laugh the whole world in the face? That's insane.
If you don't think that they were actually putting forward a tale to be believed in the first place, but were signalling that they don't have to bother, then it just doesn't even apply.
>Neither is a logical argument, both are abductive heuristics
Occam's razor is a logical position to take in an absence of further information, although sometimes wrong, especially in biology. Hanlon setting up malice and stupidity as an exclusive or gate, is not. Nor was it ever meant to be taken as such.
>Which is why nobody is willing to bet on making such stupid and dangerous mistakes on purpose as exposing your agents, exposing your leader's lies and making your country suffer retribution for assassination on foreign soil. And for what? To laugh the whole world in the face? That's insane.
Putin has been exposing his own lies for years on TV, usually with a smile. This is the guy who goes on his third ever scuba dive on the news and brings back museum quality amphorae. Lying barefacedly, with the audience knowing it is all lies, is a large part of his public persona. It is meant to both be funny and set an example that he doesn't need to bother with little things such as truth.
>The PM put on a diving suit and dived deep into the Taman Bay where, to everyone’s utter surprise, he managed to find two ancient amphorae dating back to the 6th century AD.
>Putin also told journalists that the Taman dive was his third-ever attempt at scuba diving.
Then you don't seem to have an argument against Hanlon's razor?
> Hanlon setting up malice and stupidity as an exclusive or gate, is not
In this case, clearly, the two explanations are incompatible: either Putin planned the world to discover that he was lying about the assassination, etc., etc., or he did not.
> brings back museum quality amphorae
That's a completely different class of lies. That one is a bravado that shows the level of intelligence he assumes in his fans, nothing more. He certainly didn't risk getting himself into another cold war by fishing out those amphorae!
We see the loud online group that grew up after the 90s shitshow but not the rest of the population, which has far more influence and institutional power (for what it's worth). They are far more likely to support Putin for getting the country through that ordeal.