IT is almost as if the cloak has become more important than the dagger. A former Russian spy has been poisoned. So too has his daughter. Few, if anyone, knows for sure what has happened. Yet everyone has a hot take. And that includes the propagandists.

Sergei and Yulia Skripal are real enough and so is the threat to their lives. But within 24 hours of their collapsing in Salisbury, Russia’s sometimes surreal spin machine was at full swing. Guilty or not, the Kremlin had its theories at the ready.

Sergei Skripal: Cobra meeting due as counter-terror police pore over Russian sickness clues

“Anyone who has studied history knows that the British are the champions at poisoning,” an unnamed representative of GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, told a pro-Putin newspaper, Moskovskiy Komsomolets. “They have been poisoning like pros for centuries, that is their trademark style.”

The man from GRU reckons Western intelligence agencies were trying to “make a noise” to discredit Russia’s president as he heads into elections.

“I feel sorry for him,” the anonymous spy supposedly told the paper before adding that the British probably tried to keep Skripal alive long enough to maximise the PR effect.

Such Kremlin spin is not evidence that the Russian state tried to kill Skripal, a man they handed over seven years ago in a spy swap. He had been pardoned for selling out GRU agents across Europe back in the mid-1990s for a re $100,000.

READ MORE: Former spy’s alleged poisoning ‘in long line of Russia eliminating enemies’

However, suggesting the British poisoned Skripal – who has been out of the spy game for nearly two decades –is handy whatever any UK investigation concludes. Russia, after all, may have reason to throw a cloak around a future charge of state murder, a future dagger. The Kremlin’s best defence will not be that it does not kill: there are too many Russian bodies for that to be easily spun. No, Mr Putin’s regime will pretend all states behave the same way. It can only do that if it convinces people that other states lie in the way its does.

Spy swap: A look at the four Russians freed in 2010 exchange

So RT, Russia’s main misinformation vehicle, yesterday ran a clip of a one-time contributor, one Jeremy Corbyn, berating the BBC for repeating “fake news”.