That's just it, doing something unbelievably stupid for marginal gain is the Russian M.O. right now. There are still people in hazmat suits cleaning up leftover nerve agent in Salisbury.
They either had nothing to do with it, or they did have something to do with it and it was for good reasons (good for them, not us) that we don’t understand. But them doing it because they are stupid is probably not one of the explanations.
How do you know I'm wrong? You heard it from one of those same sources? I'm not saying I would outright believe RT or any of Putin's outlets either, but that's exactly the point: a healthy dose of skepticism is called for.
Nonetheless we're getting pretty far afield. Select two incidents where any nation has killed its double-agents or whistleblowers (and I doubt there are any nations that lavish fond treatment on their double-agents in particular), and you now have evidence against that country equivalent to that upon which you declared Russia the only possible country brazen enough to carry out these two embassy attacks (assuming they were attacks).
Skripal, Litvinenko, Gorbuntsov, Perepilichnyy and others. Not two.
You realize Russia has invaded (and annexed territory from) multiple neighboring sovereign nations over the last 10 years? The idea that the west is simply posturing to set up a war with Russia while Russia is starting actual wars is laughable.
Imagine that the US as a nation was dissolved at some point. And some of our territory, perhaps a bit of Texas, ended up the property of Mexico. This new part of Mexico remained almost entirely American in both ethnicity and identity. And then some decades later Mexico began to collapse in internal turmoil with their government being violently overthrown from within. In the mean time the former US had regained a good deal of its lost strength.
In the midst of this, local forces in the annexed regions of Mexico, probably with some support of the US, formed their own interim government. And they then held a vote on whether they should remain part of Mexico, or return to the US. And with 83% voter turnout, 97% voted to return to the US. Those are certainly North Korea like poll numbers, but they have been reflected in later polls by third party organizations including Gallup. If anything it reflects how absurd the initial situation was. The US then declared them as part of its territory and the 'invasion' ended with nary a fatality.
I think there is a strong argument that the people should have been allowed to return as part of Russia if they so overwhelmingly desired it. But even that was something that was not independently acted on. You had a nation collapsing and a group of people in that nation that really did not want to be there. Annexation and war generally implies that the annexed nation did not want to be annexed. In this case, it was their former 'owner' that was holding them against their will.
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The Project for the New American Century was a think tank made up of basically every big name in Washington. It was from Bush's era, but many are still playing extremely prominent roles in DC politics. This paper from them [1], 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' is one of the most honest and clear views of neoliberal foreign policy to date. To avoid bias, I'm going to avoid commenting directly on the paper. Other than to say that our foreign policy actions make vastly more sense if you peruse that paper, but it will also make you vastly more cynical. Keep in mind there that Russia's rise from the USSR's collapse is something that certainly qualifies as what the paper refers to as 'the emergence of a new international player.'
[1] - http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/RebuildingAmeri...
The downside to this structure is that you have rogue agents you can’t control. The upside is that clandestine operations are very difficult to uncover if nobody in Russia knows about it.