Facing the facts about Putin’s gangster state

SO now we know the truth. Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent, developed by the Russian state.

It would be appalling enough if such a horrific and deadly chemical were deployed in the heat of battle. To use it as a weapon of assassination against a civilian and his daughter in a sleepy British city – also endangering the safety of hundreds of innocent families – is simply grotesque.

The revelation places the blame for the Salisbury outrage firmly at Vladimir Putin’s door. Either he authorised a direct attack on Britain, or his government allowed this pernicious toxin – one of a group called Novichoks, designed both to evade detection and to bypass arms accords – to fall into the hands of criminals.

Either way, this is brazen aggression directed or sanctioned by a foreign head of state and cannot be tolerated.

After such a serious assault on our national security, the Commons should have been united in its condemnation yesterday.

But with depressing predictability Jeremy Corbyn was interested only in scoring petty political points. Rather than denouncing Mr Putin, he turned his fire on the Tories, accusing them of accepting money from oligarchs (without any evidence). He then proceeded to ask some rambling questions about the resources available to the emergency services.

It was utterly disgraceful and an insult to the victims of this horrendous attack.

But we shouldn’t really be surprised. Mr Corbyn is an old Marxist who consorted with Soviet-bloc agents in the 1980s and has appeared on the Kremlin-controlled television station Russia Today. And he has a long record of siding with Britain’s enemies – from the IRA to Hezbollah.

Heaven help us all if he ever gets anywhere near the levers of power.

So what action must Theresa May take if the Russians don’t meet her ultimatum to come up with a ‘credible response’ to the accusations by the end of today?

She has promised a ‘full range’ of diplomatic and financial measures and the question of whether England should play in the football World Cup.

The Mail accepts that it’s unlikely the English FA will agree to withdrawing their team but they can’t blithely turn up in Russia three months from now as if nothing had happened. This is Putin’s tournament and he will exploit every opportunity it offers to raise his profile on the world stage.

Yet he is the head of a rogue state which murders its opponents abroad, bombs children in Syria, illegally occupies parts of Ukraine, routinely launches cyber attacks on other countries and is implicated in the shooting down of a civilian airliner.

Morality has not always been football’s strong suit but shouldn’t the sport at least consider the possibility that colluding in this tyrant’s tawdry propaganda coup is simply wrong.