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Skripal was seen as a traitor, having acted as a double-agent for British Intelligence. There's a clear pattern of Putin going after "traitors" - Alexander Litvinenko had publicly accused Putin of conducting assassinations and organizing false terrorist attacks before fleeing to the UK and famously being assassinated with Polonium there. Maksim Kuzminov was just assassinated in Spain a few months ago for having defected to Ukraine with a helicopter.
As the article states the arms which were destroyed were likely to end up being received by the Free Syrian Army, in opposition to the Assad regime supported by Putin - or alternatively, to Ukraine, against which Russia had just started a conflict.
A Russian would say to you that if it's indeed a GRU op, they should do an internal investigation and shoot behind the garden shed the ones who devised / permitted it, after making effort to find out whether they were working for the other side, or just dumb on their own.
Or perhaps the whole GRU is defunct. Many Russians would not reject this idea outright.
A naive Russian, I would say. Let's take a simple example:
> In 2009 the Šapošnikovs purchased a sprawling villa on the picturesque Aegean peninsula of Halkidiki, Greece. The price, as recorded in the notarial deed of purchase obtained by The Insider, was 275,292 euros, or $300,000 at the time. Elena would later tell investigators that she had funded the investment “with money from my parents” – a tall order for the septuagenarian couple living in Kyiv on pensions of under $300 per month.
I don't believe that the people who approved such money transfers were small fish in the GRU.
These numbers are laughtably small. You can't imagine amount of corruption in Russia. Any high-ranking policeman in a mid-sized city will own few villas like that. GRU agent who can smuggle anything and everything might easily have millions of dollars under their pillow.
The ammunition warehouses in Vrbětice exploded in October 2014.