Irish Examiner View: More questions for Comrade Filatov after airline atrocity

Russia may eventually come to realise that much of the rest of the world does not want to be part of their club.

The Russian ambassador to Ireland Yury Filatov holds a media briefing on the situation in Syria at the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Dublin.

When Moscow’s man in Dublin was summoned to his meeting at the Department of Foreign Affairs to be challenged over his country’s imposition of a travel stoplist on 52 Irish politicians and diplomats, it might be expected he was told that it was conduct unbecoming of the Kremlin’s senior official and flag-waver-in-chief in the Republic.

Mr Filatov might have taken it all in a day’s work for an apparatchik who doesn’t form policy but has to defend it.