BLUF:[American Thinker] Oddly enough, Skripal's poisoning was triggered not by the actions of the Trump administration, but by the indictment put forward by Mueller's team against 13 Russians from the "troll factory" on February 16, 2018.
On this day, the Kremlin realized that the noose is being tightened, and, from the Kremlin's point of view, it does not matter at all whether the Trump team or the Mueller team did it. Under no circumstances would Moscow have allowed the GRU to be called a true source of the "Russian dossier" on Trump. The Kremlin urgently needed to send world public opinion to a false direction.
The Kremlin considered the nonexistent Steele-Miller-Skripal link as a convenient and timely combination of circumstances, an opportunity that it could not pass up. Putin's regime had to prove that it was not Russian intelligence services who composed the "Russian dossier." The Kremlin needed to send the investigation on the wrong track ‐ ostensibly, this Skripal was the very "source close to the Kremlin" of Christopher Steele. Moreover, supposedly, this is precisely why the buyers of the "Russian dossier" decided to eliminate Skripal.
In other words, the Skripal poisoning was a cover-up operation of the Kremlin, the purpose of which was to send the "ObamaGate" investigation in a false direction.
For the Kremlin, killing Skripal looked like a pretty attractive move that would explain much, if not all, to the court of public opinion. It would explain the fact that the "author of the dossier" sufficiently "knew Russian material" and the fact that the linguistic analysis of the "dossier" showed that the text was written grammatically correctly and formatted according to MI6 reporting standards but that the author is not a native English speaker.