"First, this is a statement by the prime minister delivered from the despatch box in Parliament. In diplomacy, the bearer of a message, where it is delivered from and the delay of delivery act together to form a diplomatic volume of sorts. For example, when the U.S. government failed to publicly attribute the 2016 Democratic National Committee hack to the Russian government until Oct. 7 of that year, and even then, the announcement wasn’t made by the president from the White House podium, it was widely seen internationally as a show of weakness by the United States.
May did not make this mistake. Here, May made the statement herself, from the prime minister’s despatch box—the parliamentary equivalent of the White House press podium—within a few days of the attack. The despatch box is the podium from which the prime minister speaks to Parliament and the world. This is the U.K. beginning its response at maximum diplomatic volume.
Next, the prime minister’s choice of words is important. She says the U.K. assesses it to be “highly likely” that the Russian government was behind the attack. “Highly likely” is the U.K. intelligence community’s highest level of confidence. Attributions are never certain, so the U.K. intelligence community never says “X happened.” Instead it says “we assess it is highly likely that X happened.” The U.K. intelligence community doesn’t get more certain than that. This too is a signal: This is the U.K. saying its threshold to be convinced of the attribution has already been made. It needs no more proof to act.
May then explains that Skripal was poisoned by a “military grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia, . . . one of a group of nerve agents known as ‘Novichok’.” She is laying out the basic groundwork for their attribution to a nation state, and more specifically, Russia. At Porton Down, the U.K. has one of the world’s best forensic labs for analyzing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. With the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko this lab not only established that Polonium-210 was used, but also which reactor in Russia it came from.
When the U.K. makes strong attributions about chemical weapons, the rest of the international intelligence community sits up and pays attention.
Finally, May says magic legal words that will be keeping foreign ministers in NATO up at night: “If there is no credible response by the end of Tuesday, the U.K. will conclude there has been an ‘unlawful use of force’ by Moscow.” The words “use of force” are legal terms concerning armed conflict, or jus ad bellum. She does not use them here by accident. The U.K. is stating loudly and unequivocally that the Russian government’s use of chemical weapons to murder people in the U.K. isn’t being treated as a law-enforcement matter. It’s an armed attack, and the U.K.’s response will be justified under the doctrine of self-defense."
http://www.lawfareblog.com/uk-prime-ministers-speech-russian-poisoning-sergei-skripal-decoding-signals
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