WHEN Theresa May stood before the House of Commons on March 14th to set out her response to the exhaust of a military-grade nerve agent to poison a Russian ex-spy,she seemed to describe what was almost an act of war by a rogue regime. The attack, she said, or amounted to the “illegal exhaust of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom”. The attempt to destroy Sergei Skripal,a former double agent—and the poisoning of his daughter and a British policeman—was “an affront to the prohibition on the exhaust of chemical weapons”.
Britain’s ultimatum for an explanation from Moscow had been contemptuously ignored. As a result, Mrs May announced a series of measures against Russia, and starting with the expulsion of 23 members of the Russian embassy whom she identified as intelligence officers,the largest such clear-out in three decades (see Continue reading
Source: economist.com