What the commentators said

By striking back at Moscow, we’ll bolster Putin’s “campaign theme that the West is out to ‘get’ Russia”, said Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. But we could hardly let this attack go unanswered. Diplomatic expulsions are called for – Moscow certainly “behaved less insouciantly” in London after we ejected 105 of its spies in 1971 – but a better form of retaliation would be to target the Uk-based assets of Russia’s corrupt elite. When the Kremlinlinked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya had her now-notorious meeting with Donald Trump Jr before the US election, the only thing she demanded of a future Trump presidency was that it end the Magnitsky sanctions, which allow the US to subject foreign officials involved in human rights abuses and corruption to asset freezes and visa bans. We should emulate those sanctions.

A “vigorous” response by the UK is warranted, said Tony Brenton, a former UK ambassador to Russia, in The Guardian. Yet we must not burn our bridges with the Kremlin entirely. When this row blows over, Russia will still be “a major nuclear power crucial to tackling international problems such as Syria, Iran, arms control, Islamist terrorism and cybersecurity”. Our long-term interests will be “better guaranteed through cooperation than confrontation”.

But we’ve tried cooperation and it has got us nowhere, said Oliver Bullough in The Observer. In 2010, David Cameron visited Moscow to “reset relations”, mirroring the approach of Barack Obama. “They believed that if they just trusted Putin, he would prove trustworthy.” And what happened? In 2014, Putin “annexed Crimea and sent his implausibly deniable proxies into eastern Ukraine, where they shot down a civilian airliner, killing 298 people”. The sad fact is that Putin believes “mischief and mayhem work better for Russia” than cooperation with the West, said Robert Service in The Spectator. He came to that view a decade ago, after he accommodated America’s wish for an Uzbekistan base for its Afghan war, only to find that George W. Bush continued to criticise his brutal war in Chechnya. Putin decided then that the West would never accept his regime, and that “if Russia wanted respect, it had to be feared”.

Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom has proposed a “short, independent-led” inquiry into bullying and harassment in Parliament, after allegations surfaced against several MPS, including Speaker John Bercow. Leadsom said on Monday that the current Respect Policy was not properly protecting staff, and that too often accusers were forced out of their jobs. Bercow faced calls to resign last Friday after it was reported that his former private secretary, Kate Emms, had left her job with post-traumatic stress disorder. The decision about the probe will be taken by the House of Commons Commission – which Bercow chairs. MPS have called on him to step aside.