British Prime Minister Theresa May took action against the Kremlin on Wednesday when she banished 23 Russian diplomats “who have been identified as foreign intelligence officers” from her nation’s shores. The expulsion was in direct response to the alleged—but “highly likely”—Russian use of an internationally undeclared “military grade” nerve agent called “Novichok” on March 4 in Salisbury, England. The attack was an attempted murder targeting two British nationals, the Sergei Skripal and his 33-year old daughter Yulia. The prime minister called the attempted homicides “an indiscriminate and reckless act against the United Kingdom.”
Sergei Skripal is an ex-Russian spy who had been a double agent for Britain’s MI6; he worked in the 1990s as bureaucrat for various Russian ministries, and the Russians hold him responsible for exposing their clandestine agents in a variety of foreign countries. He was tried and imprisoned in Russia in the mid-2000s but sent back to the U.K. as part of a spy-swap deal.
By “indiscriminate” the prime minister presumably meant the use of nerve agents in a highly populated area. Trace amounts of the chemical weapon have been detected around Salisbury restaurants, and a British police sergeant, Nick Bailey, is among those injured by the chemical weapon. Sergei and Yulia Skripal remain, almost two weeks after the attempted murder, in critical condition.
May is putting two and two together. She offered the Russians the opportunity to explain how their nerve agent might have came into someone else’s possession, and how it might have ended up in the United Kingdom. But she was frank with the House of Commons; she was aware, she said that the Russians have provided “no credible explanation that could suggest they lost control of their nerve agent.”
Still, Russia has denied any culpability for the act, calling accusations of Kremlin involvement “nonsense.” Clearly that is a lie. The flouting of international norms; the use of lethal force to instill fear in dissidents; the readiness to renege on international agreements—these are the telltale signs of Kremlin involvement.
Six years after the dissident Alexander Litvinenko fled Russia in 2000 and became a strident critic of Vladimir Putin, he mysteriously ingested polonium-210 with his tea. He died two weeks later. When the Russian opposition politician and democracy campaigner Vladimir Kara-Murza stepped up his criticisms of the Putin regime, he was poisoned twice, once in 2015 and again in 2017. Kara-Murza lives on, for now.
Assassination has become one of the Kremlin’s chief foreign policy tools. The regime will carry out this policy within its own borders, or on foreign soil. It will likely happen on American soil in due course, and the White House should be prepared to respond decisively.
