A gangster exposed

THERE’S no need to take Boris Johnson’s word for it that attempting to engage with Vladimir Putin on civilised terms is a ‘fool’s errand’. For this week the Russian president’s utter contempt for the lawbased international order was exposed for the whole world to see.

His open mockery of our values, when he put the Salisbury assassins on TV to tell a cock-and-bull story about being innocent day-trippers, would almost be laughable if this weren’t such a deadly serious matter.

But deadly it is. Through this repulsive stunt, insulting the public’s intelligence and thumbing his nose at the British Government and police, Mr Putin effectively admitted he sent henchmen to commit murder on British soil – with enough nerve agent, say security services, to kill 4,000.

Who can now doubt that guilt for the poisoning of Dawn Sturgess, who died in consequence of the attempt on the lives of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, lies at his door?

Forget Mr Johnson’s fake bravado in daring the two assassins to sue him for branding them ‘ murderers’ ( hardly a courageous stand, after Theresa May had said as much in the Commons).

After the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, the only wonder is that it has taken Western politicians so long to realise that in Mr Putin they are dealing with a gangster who will stop at nothing.

Since the killers’ macabre TV appearance, surely nobody – except perhaps the Kremlin- besotted ‘ useful idiots’ who surround Jeremy Corbyn – will make the mistake of trusting him again.

This paper hopes that with the scales now fallen from political leaders’ eyes, the West will urgently join forces to explore ways of containing the threat Mr Putin poses.

One thing’s for sure: with Russia now engaged in the largest- scale war games since the fall of the Soviet Union – involving 300,000 troops, 36,000 military vehicles and 1,000 aircraft – the potency of that threat can hardly be exaggerated.