PM warns of new sanctions after tit-for-tat expulsions
LONDON: Prime Minister Theresa May said the UK may take further action against Russia over the nerve-agent poisoning of a former spy and his daughter after Moscow ordered 23 British diplomats to leave the country in a tit-for-tat retaliation.
“We anticipated a response of this kind and we will consider our next steps in the coming days, alongside our allies and partners,” Ms May said at a Conservative Party forum in London on Saturday. Russia also ordered the British consulate in St Petersburg to close and told the British Council to end its work in the country.
The Foreign Ministry in Moscow summoned UK ambassador Laurie Bristow on Saturday to tell him of the retaliation for Ms May’s expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats from London. The measures were in response to “the provocative actions of the British side and the unsubstantiated accusations” against Russia, the ministry said.
The confrontation escalated after Ms May accused Moscow on Wednesday of an “unlawful use of force” involving a weapons-grade nerve agent and ordered out the largest number of Russian diplomats from London in 30 years. She also broke off all high-level contacts over the chemical attack that poisoned former Kremlin double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the city of Salisbury on March 4. The pair remain in critical condition.
The first use of a nerve agent on European soil since World War II is a direct challenge to the Western alliance, days before elections are almost certain to give Vladimir Putin a fourth term as Russia’s president. Tensions heightened further when UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Friday that it was “overwhelmingly likely” Mr Putin personally ordered the operation, a comment described as “unpardonable diplomatic misconduct” by the Kremlin
“This crisis has arisen as a result of an appalling attack” in the UK involving “a chemical weapon developed in Russia and not declared by Russia at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, as Russia was and is obliged to do,” Mr Bristow told reporters in televised comments as he left the ministry.
Russia gave the British diplomats one week to leave. “If further actions of an unfriendly nature are taken against Russia, the Russian side reserves the right to take other retaliatory measures,” the ministry said.
The UK National Security Council will meet early next week to “consider next steps,” the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London said in a statement on Saturday. “We continue to believe it is not in our national interest to break off all dialogue between our countries but the onus remains on the Russian state to account for their actions.”
US President Donald Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron backed the UK in a joint statement with Ms May and said there’s “no plausible alternative explanation” to Russian responsibility.
Russia’s response is “moderate, expected and appropriate,” said Oleg Morozov, a former senior Kremlin official who now sits on the foreign affairs committee of the upper house of parliament. “It’s impossible not to respond in this situation. Britain is acting too defiantly.”