DECLAN POWER: Why burying our heads in the sand isn’t an option:

AMID a welter of hyperbole, the Irish State decided to expel a Russian diplomat yesterday. The way some are carrying on you would think we had declared war.

It should be remembered that we have done no more and no less than states such as Finland and Sweden, traditional Euro neutrals like ourselves, but who value their close relationship within western Europe.

So let’s try to understand what’s happening here. The expulsion is on foot of the alleged actions by elements of the Russian intelligence services in attempting to murder a Russian defector and his daughter.

As we know this wasn’t any old murder attempt, but one using a lethal nerve agent called Novichok, which was created by the old Soviet Union as a means of defeating Nato chemical warfare protective suits that infantry soldiers wear during a chemical weapons attack.

Make no mistake, this chemical agent is a battlefield weapon, every bit as lethal and maybe more so as a guided missile or a lump of Semtex. That something so lethal was used to attempt to murder one man and his daughter in a built-up civilian environment during peacetime is what is so repugnant to western civil society.

On an international basis, Russia had kept prodding its neighbours. It started with the annexation of a chunk of another country, the Crimea in 2014, and then the de-stabilisation of the Ukraine. The international community struggled to reply in a unified fashion and Russia grew bolder. Its emboldened stance in shoring up the odious Assad regime in Syria (at a time when a possible peace deal was looming between the exhausted combatants) demonstrated further contempt for rules-based interactions between nation states.

In the intervening years the surge of Russian activity in the western world became more and more apparent to the intelligence and security services.