We must face up to this new world and ensure that Ukraine defeats the gangster in the Kremlin – no matter what the risks

THE shameful killing of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, which his widow Yulia thinks was done with nerve agent Novichok, raises an immediate question.

How best should the West retaliate?

Foreign Secretary David Cameron has warned the Kremlin there will be ‘ consequences’, adding: ‘We don’t announce them in advance.’

Putin suspects this is bluster and the West will do next to nothing. I fear he is right. He has watched us stand by while he razed Chechnya, bullied Estonia, invaded Georgia, annexed Crimea and propped up a fascist dictatorship in Syria. Even when President Assad gassed his own people with the connivance of the Russians, we did nothing but wring our hands.

Danger

Yes, the West has supplied Ukraine with arms, worth billions of dollars, materiel and training since the dictator’s full- scale invasion nearly two years ago — but war-weariness is setting in. Further Western support hangs by a thread, not least thanks to the partisan deadlock in Washington DC.

And yet if the gangster in the Kremlin thinks we can do nothing to respond to this murder most foul, he is sorely mistaken. For one thing, if the death of Navalny is to mean anything, it should be to galvanise support for Ukraine.

After all, no other credible force opposes the Russian dictator: only that brave, dogged army, fighting against overwhelming odds.

Ukrainians have astonished the world with their tenacity but, increasingly abandoned by the West, they are — it pains me to say — in danger of losing this war. To a large extent, that’s our fault. They asked us, again and again, for weapons. We dithered and flinched.

President Zelensky and his people urgently need Western artillery shells to repel the invaders, plus long- range missiles to cripple the Kremlin’s war machine. We must supply them at once.

But as well as shoring up

Ukraine, we can do much more to hurt Putin directly — in his pocket first of all.

The time has come for the West to seize the Russian Central Bank’s frozen assets abroad: valued at $300 billion.

About two-thirds of this lucre is held at Euroclear, a ‘securities depository’ based in Belgium. The Russian state assets include cash and government bonds denominated in euros, dollars and other currencies.

Central-bank assets are normally protected under international law. Confiscating them might cause countries like China or Saudi Arabia to take fright and switch their assets away from pounds, euros or dollars, in turn threatening to destabilise global finance.

Yet legal niceties and economic ructions should not be the top priorities when dealing with rogue states. While the obstacles to taking this course of action may be daunting, they can be overcome.

Third, it has become commonplace to say Western sanctions aren’t working in Russia. The Moscow elite does find it harder to travel abroad (although Russian voices can still be heard in the shopping malls of Dubai and on the beaches of Turkey). But the Kremlin can still sell much of its vast mineral wealth, including coal, oil and gas, on the global market.

Until this trade is halted, any sanctions will lack bite.

Severing the tentacles of the Kremlin’s economic octopus will hurt Putin personally, and stoke tensions within his inner circle. It would also provide a war chest for Ukraine’s fight and eventual reconstruction.

Fourth, we should be far tougher with Putin’s international ‘enablers’: the bankers, lawyers, accountants, spivs, creeps and grifters who undermine Western sanctions.

Among them are oil-traders in the United Arab Emirates, money-men in offshore financial jurisdictions in the Caribbean, those who create shell companies and trusts that conceal ownership and the gobetweens who enable Russian deals with other rogue states such as Venezuela, Myanmar and African dictatorships.

To their shame, many of these people are British — and should face criminal penalties for helping Putin.

Those from all countries should face visa bans when they try to travel to other Western countries. U.S. passport-holders would find they can’t visit Britain, and vice versa. Europe could add sanctions too.

Which brings me to a final possible course of action — perhaps the most outlandish. Many would say Putin’s assassination of Navalny, killings of other opponents and his warmongering have all made him a legitimate target himself.

To put it plainly: Is it time to help Ukraine assassinate the Russian dictator?

Kyiv’s drone attacks on Moscow buildings last year showed President Zelensky is prepared to pinpoint targets within the Russian government complex. It’s reasonable to assume that, if it’s possible for a crack team of his assassins to take out their country’s tormentor, they will attempt it.

Threat

Many would hope that our intelligence agencies give them the support they need, arguing that the Russians have launched a lethally rough game. They must now play by their own rules.

The assassination of Putin would be fraught with difficulties, of course. He is notorious for using doubles: ensuring the real despot-in-chief was killed would be no easy thing.

Most importantly, Putin is just one man. Our real problem is with Russian imperialism. That predates him and will outlast him. This is the real mess, and one of our making.

On Sunday, former president Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, threatened nuclear retaliation against the UK, Germany and the U.S. if the Kremlin’s occupying army is driven out of eastern Ukraine.

‘Attempts to restore Russia’s 1991 borders will lead only to one thing — a global war with Western countries with the use of our entire strategic arsenal against Kyiv, Berlin, London and Washington,’ he ranted.

This apocalyptic threat is due to Western weakness, not just over Ukraine but in three decades of greed and complacency as Russia turned from Communism to gangsterism.

From the early 1990s until almost two years ago, I and others were patronised and belittled for warning that, though Russia was weak after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was not friendly.

As a result, the West systematically underestimated Moscow’s military and other threats and failed to steel itself for a changing world. We now have aircraft carriers that are unseaworthy, warships that lack sufficient crews, fighter jets without pilots and regiments without enough soldiers.

Bleak

So limited are our stockpiles of spare parts and munitions that, within a week or two of a war breaking out, our frontline forces would be reduced to fixing bayonets.

The situation bears striking parallels to 1938. But the difference shortly before the outbreak of World War II was that a Spitfire could be built from scratch in weeks. Procurement of today’s hightech weapons can take years.

We must face up to a new world. The U.S. security guarantee to Europe that began with D-Day and the Berlin airlift is dead. The bleak truth is we can’t trust the Americans to protect us any more — even before, as is likely, Trump returns to the White House.

Our European allies, meanwhile, are hopelessly divided between those who will fight at all costs, those who will fight under no circumstances and a muddled middle that doesn’t know what it thinks.

This can be the moment for Britain to seize the reins in Europe and take our place at the heart of the continent’s security.

We must do what we can to tackle Putin directly — and not flinch from doing so.