HOW WILL WEST REACT TO PROOF PUTIN LIED?

THIS sensational revelation – the seniority of the would-be assassin and the official state support for the mission – shows that the Skripal hit must have been ordered at the very highest levels of the Russian state.

The evidence that Vladimir Putin personally ordered the attack grows stronger every day.

Indeed, by presiding over one of the most farcically inept cover-ups in memory Putin has condemned himself out of his own mouth.

Days after British police released dozens of security camera images of the pair on their way from Moscow to Salisbury, Putin appeared on Russian TV to defend them as ‘innocent Russian citizens about whom we know nothing’. His fingerprints were all over the operation.

The following afternoon, ‘Petrov’ and ‘ Boshirov’ themselves appeared to air a cock-and-bull story about being turned back from their mission to see Salisbury by slush – two days in a row.

Before the denials by Putin and the suspects, it might have been possible to argue plausibly that the botched assassination attempt was some kind of rogue operation by Russia’s secret services.

But Putin’s personal defence of the suspects and the inept coverup job by the state- controlled media constitute strong, if wholly unintended, proof of the Kremlin’s deep complicity.

And now the Bellingcat revelations have added incontrovertible layers of detail to the emerging picture of a top-level GRU assassination squad operating on UK soil.

Bellingcat’s researchers first unearthed details of the passports the suspects used to enter the UK, published by British police.

Petrov and Boshirov’s passport numbers, it turned out, varied by just a single digit – and were issued by a Moscow office used exclusively for officials’ travel documents. Even more suspiciously, Boshirov’s passport file was stamped with: ‘Do not reveal information.’

Then, yesterday, came the clincher. By trawling through the records of GRU academy graduation classes, Bellingcat matched the photos of ‘Boshirov’ to the reallife Anatoliy Vladimirovich Chepiga. Once they had a name, details of Colonel Chepiga’s secret service popped up all over the internet, in online posts by veterans’ groups and even written in letters of gold on a stone monument to the decorated graduates of one of the GRU’s secret intelligence academies.

Chepiga served in Chechnya with the Spetznaz, the elite forces of the Federal Security Service, where by some reports he received 20 awards and decorations.

In short, Putin has been caught out telling analogue lies in a digital world. Bellingcat became famous for its painstaking investigation into the downing of a Malaysian Airlines Boeing over Eastern Ukraine in July 2014, collecting photos from social media and intelligence data. Russia’s vehement denials of involvement were shown to be false.

Now, with Bellingcat’s dozens of detailed revelations about the true identity of one of the would-be Skripal assassins, another of the Kremlin’s brazen lies has been picked apart. Perhaps the most terrifying part of the whole tragic story is the shocking combination of Moscow’s deadly intent and utter incompetence.

Instead of quietly disposing of a ‘traitor’, Chepiga and his as-yetunnamed accomplice succeeded in contaminating parts of Salisbury, murdering an innocent woman, and revealing themselves to the whole world as bungling idiots.

The question now, of course, is what the response of the West will be to this damning revelation. FOR the first time, the world has direct evidence of an act of Russian chemical terrorism on the territory of a Nato power. For the Kremlin, the timing could not be more dire.

Already, the US State and Treasury Departments have introduced sanctions that threaten to cut Russia off from the world economy by shutting off access to Western money and markets by Kremlinconnected banks, oil companies and metals producers.

Effectively, Washington is on the verge of branding Russia a rogue state, on a par with North Korea.

A separate set of sanctions being mooted by the US Congress over Russian election hacking will add even more draconian measures.

The latest revelations will give further impetus to British and European efforts to expand and deepen sanctions against Kremlinconnected individuals who hide their stolen money in the West.

The news that Russia is an official sponsor of terror could scupper a multi- billion- euro gas pipeline project by the Russian energy giant Gazprom to export gas direct to Germany under the Baltic Sea. It is vital to Russia’s gas- dependent economy, but its future has been jeopardised by Putin’s murderous plots – and his hapless lies.

What is clear is that the Kremlin and its henchmen have been revealed for what they are – not just a bunch of murderers and liars, but terrible at both.