Orient Net, March 29, 2018 – Theresa May has warned that the west needs to develop a long-term response to the renewed Russian threat as she claimed more than 25 countries had joined the unprecedented coalition taking diplomatic action against Vladimir Putin in response to the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, according to Reuters.
British officials are convinced that the Russian president is privately taken aback by the scale of the coalition that has formed against Russia and may even in the medium term see the need to recalibrate how he handles the west.
May’s warning came as more EU members, as well as NATO, joined the group of countries expelling Russian diplomats or recalling their own diplomats from Moscow.
States joining the coalition of disapproval included Ireland, Belgium and Bulgaria, even if they only expelled a token single diplomat or, as in the case of Bulgaria, just recalled its own ambassador from Moscow for consultations.
The NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, earlier announced that he was cutting the size of the Russian mission to NATO by a third from 30 to 20 and insisted the measures would materially affect Russian intelligence gathering.