President Vladimir Putin’s supporters doubt that London has enough evidence to prove that Russian authorities sent a nerve agent to England to kill Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The strong public opinion inside Russia is that the West is wrong to be putting too much pressure on the Kremlin—unless they want to help Putin shore up his power at home. “Europeans must know how stubborn we Russians are, that we never give up,” a student of a local law school, Veronika Ozerova told The Daily Beast. “Every time they are unfair to Putin, we support him even more.”

Independent analysts take a different point of view. “The day will come when British investigators roll out hardcore evidence of Russian spies being behind Skripal’s poisoning. The Kremlin will have to admit that they lie, just the way they had to admit it, when London presented the world with the investigation of [Alexander] Litvinenko’s murder in London,” a prominent Russian analyst and professor, Vladimir Ryzhkov, told The Daily Beast.

But that is not the opinion currently reflected on Russian state TV channels.