Where's the evidence for the alleged Soviet-era "Novichok" nerve agent that the British authorities claim to have detected? And indeed where exactly are the Skripal father and daughter, reportedly confined to hospital intensive care? Strangely, their condition remains unknown and unreported.

Prime Minister Theresa May's dramatic announcement in the House of Commons this week blaming Russia for attempted murder and then expulsion of "Russian spies" from Britain, followed by an unprecedented joint statement of "solidarity" from the leaders of Britain, the US, France and Germany — all suggests a choreographed script to impugn Moscow as an international pariah.

There's an embarrassing lack of hard evidence or credible logic to make the British claims stand up. It's all sound and fury signifying nothing, as Shakespeare would say.

But the wider, unspoken significance may be the huge strategic loss unfolding for Britain and its NATO allies in Syria. For the past month, the Syrian state forces and its Russian ally have been closing in on the last-remaining stronghold of the Western-backed militants occupying the suburb of Eastern Ghouta near the capital Damascus.

Today, Western news media can no longer conceal the fact that tens of thousands of civilians are being liberated from terrorist-besieged Eastern Ghouta, just as they were previously in other cities like Aleppo and Homs.

In desperation to salvage their regime-change plot, the US and its NATO allies have recently begun threatening to intervene militarily in Syria. The recurring pretext is the alleged use of chemical weapons by Syrian state forces.

The British and French have made similar warnings of "striking" Syria over chemical weapons.

What is really animating the NATO powers is that their criminal covert war in Syria for regime change is collapsing from the combined military power of the Syrian army and its allies, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. The fortitude of the Syrian people to withstand seven years of Western-imposed barbarity is also an essential resistance.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov slammed Haley's remarks about unilateral American military intervention in Syria as unlawful and unacceptable. "May we remind you that any use of force against Damascus based on far-fetched pretexts is unacceptable," he said.

Separately, Russia's top military commander, General Valery Gerasimov, also rebuked the Americans for their proposed military escalation in Syria. He said that any US military strikes would be met with decisive counter-force.

Washington and its British and French allies are intensely chafed by the fact that Russia is thwarting their imperialist scheming in Syria. Russia's veto power at the UN Security Council is particularly vexing to this rogue cabal who have tried every which way to extract a mandate from the council as a legalistic cover for military intervention in Syria — in the same way they did for overthrowing the government of Libya in 2011.

This is where the chemical-weapon incident in Britain comes into play. The media campaign mounted by the British government is aimed at undermining Russia's moral and legal authority.

Anyway, here's the revealer. Johnson accused Russia of "immense efforts to conceal the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria". Then he goes on: "How much easier does it become for a state to deploy chemical weapons when its government has already sought to hide their use by others? I would draw a connection between Putin's indulgence of Assad's atrocities in Syria and the Russian state's evident willingness to employ a chemical weapon on British soil."

Never mind that there is no evidence that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons. Damascus has repeatedly and unequivocally stated that it has not used these munitions; that its stockpile was verifiably destroyed under the Convention on Chemical Weapons back in 2014.

The groups that have most probably used toxic substances against civilians in Syria are the NATO-sponsored terrorist proxies who have sought to stage "false flag" provocations as pretexts for military intervention by Washington and its allies.

The American and British assertion that Russia has "concealed" the use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces is an obscene distortion of reality — a lie concocted by the very sponsors of false flags to enable their criminal regime-change machinations.

Ironically, the same provocation with chemical weapons is apparently being orchestrated in Britain. Assertion, allegation, innuendo, media saturation, bombast and barefaced lies are again employed to denigrate and demonize.

The audacious thing is how the "dramas" are being synchronized in two different countries. Smearing and undermining Russia with alleged chemical-weapon attacks in Britain is being parlayed to over-ride Russia and the UN Security Council with regard to Syria.

Taken together, the provocations in Britain and Syria are being engineered to give Washington and its NATO accomplices a license to kill in even greater numbers in Syria for their regime-change objective.

Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.