James Ball is an award-winning journalist and author who has worked for WikiLeaks, The Guardian, The Washington Post and BuzzFeed. The opinions in this article belong to the author.

(CNN) At first glance, RT's interview with the two men accused of poisoning former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, his daughter and two other British citizens almost looks like a joke.

The two men, claiming to be civilians, say they made their 48-hour trip to the UK to see Salisbury cathedral -- with its famous "123 meter spire" -- and Stonehenge, but couldn't due to bad weather.

The interview comes just a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the Russian authorities found the men, and "hoped" they would come forward for an interview. Helpfully, the men agreed with Putin, and thus they appeared on RT, the Kremlin-backed network that pushes Moscow's line around the world.

To anyone sensible, this story is laughably thin and deeply unconvincing, especially when contrasted with the unusual volume of evidence that the UK is providing to support its case against the two men. The account is farfetched at best, the men's story left almost entirely unchallenged by RT's editor-in-chief. Aspects of it appear to be directly contradicted by their known movements and released CCTV images.

Why, then, would Russia even bother to attempt such a crude attempt at misinformation? The answer is that Moscow is playing a more subtle game than most people realize.

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