Russian diplomat expelled - Varadkar’s token of solidarity

That our Government would sign up for the co-ordinated expulsion of Russian diplomats, some of whom might or might not be spies, seemed inevitable.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, presumably having seen evidence so far unpublished by the British government, has said that he would join other EU leaders in accepting the UK judgment that it was “highly likely” someone somewhere in the Russian government was responsible for the attempted murder of a former spy-turned-double agent and his daughter in England.

Thus one diplomat, who might or might not be a spy representing an imminent threat to citizens of this island, packs his or her bags and goes home to Mother Russia, along with one each from Sweden, Romania, Norway, Macedonia, Latvia, Hungary, Finland, Estonia, and Croatia.

As a mere token of solidarity with the Western world, from the US to Australia, booting out a diplomat was the least Dublin could have done. Russia, until yesterday, had diplomatic accreditation in Ireland for 17 staff and their partners, so any potential intelligence-gathering capability has been scratched very slightly rather than smashed.

Moscow wants to increase the size of its Dublin embassy in the suitably named Orwell Rd; it’s been given this week no reason to withdraw its application for planning permission. Yury Filatov, the Russian ambassador to Ireland, says sending diplomats home would be an “unfriendly” act, but that’s what ambassadors are paid to say.

In the short term, there are only two certainties. The first is that tit-for-tat retaliation will ensue, and that diplomatic relations between Russia on the one side and the US, EU, and Britain on the other will fall to their coolest point since the long decades of the Cold War.

Russia’s intelligence networks, especially in North America and the UK, have been damaged severely. President Vladimir Putin either underestimated the international response to the Salisbury attack or simply did not care — they can be repaired over time. Mr Skripal and his daughter is unlikely ever to be known.

Russia has form with assassinations in England: The Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, poisoned with an umbrella in 1978; the defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006; plus a possible 14 other deaths in the UK that US intelligence agencies suspect have Russian fingerprints. A Russian nationalist and a KGB veteran to his core, Mr Putin has no time for defectors.

The wider and longer-term challenge for EU governments and Nato is to accept Russia for what it is — a gangster state pretending to be a democracy — and look for ways in which both sides can resume working together on the major concerns shared: Islamic terrorism, climate change, and world trade.

Russia remains as it was in 1939, when British prime minister Winston Churchill said he was unable to predict how the country would act, describing it as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.

Maybe, he added, there is a key. “That key,” he says, “is Russian national interest.”