War and peace | 28 March 2018

After Britain voted to leave the European Union, there was much mistaken talk about how it might also move away from its allies. Boris Titov, one of Putin’s appointees and a half-hearted challenger to him in the presidential election a fortnight ago, claimed that it would break the transatlantic alliance, turning the remainder of the EU into Russophiles, adding: ‘It’s not long until a united Eurasia — about ten years’.

That fantasy was destroyed last week when, in an unprecedented show of solidarity, 23 countries announced that between them they are to expel more than 100 Russian diplomats whom they suspect have been working as spies. It is harder for Vladimir Putin to pretend that Britain’s expulsion of 23 diplomats a few days earlier was a feeble gesture from an impotent country whose accusations against his regime have proved unconvincing to others.

The mass expulsions are in response to the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, and have been arrived at on the strength of evidence which inexorably points to the involvement of the Russian state. In the immediate aftermath of the Salisbury attacks this magazine, we cautioned against a rush to judgment. Why would Putin, we asked, want to neutralise a retired double agent whom he could easily have had killed while he was in detention in Russia before being released under a spy swap with Britain?

Then came the damning revelation that the poison used in Salisbury was a nerve agent developed by and manufactured only by the former Soviet Union. As the Prime Minister observed in her statement to the Commons, that left only two possibilities: either the Russian state was involved or it had lost control of its stocks of the chemical.