It is hard to overstate the impact of the Salisbury attacks on the fraught relationship between the UK and Russia.
A senior figure involved in the UK government response told me it was a “huge tipping point.
“It was shocking in the fact that the Russians were trying to kill people on our soil, but also, so blatantly happy for us to know that it was them,” they said, pointing to the use of Novichok, known to be manufactured and used by the Russian state.
Only a year before, then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had gone to Moscow in the hope of a “reset” of the relationship between the two countries.
But another senior source told me: “we simply couldn’t have a normal relationship with them again with that in the background”.
They described the poisonings as worse than anything that had happened in the Cold War. “The competition was pretty brutal then, but this kind of thing was completely unacceptable.”
More than 20 Western allies expelled diplomats and spies from their countries in response after a bout of frantic diplomacy by Theresa May’s government, including pushing former President Trump to act.
One figure recalls, ‘it was pretty hairy at the time, a lot of Europeans didn’t want to do it. Trump personally didn’t want to do it but was persuaded to do so.”
The UK insisted that the announcement of the expulsions from each country was made at exactly the same time, with only the UK aware of how many Russians each government planned to order to leave.
The fear in Downing Street was that Trump would not be willing to take drastic action if he had known the numbers each European country were planning to expel.
The UK government now believes that Russia is the number one threat to the UK’s security.
Labour said in the election: “the defence of the UK starts in Ukraine,” and ministers believe the same now they are in government.
The UK has been at the forefront of leading the Western backing of Ukraine since the invasion in 2022, and has sent billions of pounds worth of weapons and resources to support the effort.
It’s given staunch political backing to President Zelensky – but don’t expect a decision on his request to use Western long-range missiles for at least a few weeks.
There are concerns in government about Russia increasing its efforts at sabotage on UK soil, with the boss of MI5 warning this week Russia was more and more engaged in “arson, sabotage and more dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness”.
