Criminal investigation

Vladimir Putin is innocent until proven guilty in the Russian spy case

The apparent chemical attack on a former Russian double-agent and his daughter in an English cathedral city could be straight from a cold war thriller. Unfortunately, though, the case is not going to be solved in 500 pages — nor will it be solved by July, when the Foreign Secretary has threatened to withdraw a British delegation of dignitaries, if not the English team, from the opening ceremony of the World Cup.

It was inevitable, as soon as Sergei Skripal was taken acutely ill on a bench in Salisbury, that fingers would point at Vladimir Putin. He did, after all, pass a law to give the FSB, the successor organisation to the KGB, powers to execute enemies of the Russian state on foreign soil. As Robert Service says on page 20, this form of assassination is entirely in keeping with his foreign policy.

And of course there is the case of the Russian dissident and former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died in 2006 after being poisoned with polonium at a London hotel. The nature of the poison — a substance which would be extremely difficult for ordinary criminals to obtain — was widely interpreted as a deliberate calling card of the Russian state.