EDWARD LUCAS: Is it time to help Ukraine assassinate Vladimir Putin?

The shameful murder of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, which his widow Yulia believes was committed with the nerve agent Novichok, immediately raises a question.

How should the West best take revenge?

Foreign Secretary David Cameron has warned the Kremlin that there will be “consequences”, adding: “We are not announcing them in advance.”

Putin suspects that this is a blunder and that the West will do virtually nothing. I’m afraid he’s right. He has watched us as he razed Chechnya, bullied Estonia, invaded Georgia, annexed Crimea and propped up a fascist dictatorship in Syria.

Even when President Assad gassed his own people with the connivance of the Russians, we did nothing but wring our hands.

Yes, the West has supplied Ukraine with billions of dollars worth of weapons, equipment and training since the dictator’s massive invasion almost two years ago – but war fatigue is setting in. Further Western support is hanging by a thread, not least thanks to the party political impasse in Washington DC.

And yet, if the gangster in the Kremlin thinks that we can do nothing to respond to this terrible murder, he is sorely mistaken. For starters, if Navalny’s death is to mean anything, it should be to boost support for Ukraine.

After all, there is no other credible force opposing the Russian dictator: only that brave, tenacious army, fighting against overwhelming odds.

The Ukrainians have amazed the world with their tenacity, but as they are increasingly abandoned by the West, they are, it pains me to say, in danger of losing this war. To a large extent that is our fault. They asked us for weapons again and again. We hesitated and cringed.

President Zelensky and his people desperately need Western artillery shells to repel the invaders, plus long-range missiles to cripple the Kremlin war machine. We must deliver them immediately.

But in addition to supporting Ukraine, we can do much more to hurt Putin directly – first and foremost in his pocket.

The time has come for the West to seize the Russian Central Bank’s frozen assets abroad: worth $300 billion.

About two-thirds of these profits are held with Euroclear, a ‘securities depository’ based in Belgium. Russia’s government assets include cash and government bonds denominated in euros, dollars and other currencies.

Central bank assets are normally protected by international law. Seizing them could cause countries like China or Saudi Arabia to get scared and move their assets away from pounds, euros or dollars, which in turn threatens to destabilize global finances.

Yet legal finesse and economic turmoil should not be the top priority when dealing with rogue states. Although the obstacles to this course of action can be difficult, they can be overcome.

Third, it has become commonplace to say that Western sanctions in Russia do not work. Moscow’s elite finds it harder to travel abroad (although Russian voices can still be heard in the shopping centers of Dubai and on the beaches of Turkey).

But the Kremlin can still sell much of its vast mineral wealth, including coal, oil and gas, on the global market.

Until this trade is halted, any sanctions will have little force.

Cutting the tentacles of the Kremlin’s economic octopus will hurt Putin personally and fuel tensions within his inner circle. It would also provide a war chest for Ukraine’s struggle and eventual reconstruction.

Fourth, we must take much tougher action against Putin’s international enablers: the bankers, lawyers, accountants, spivs, creeps and scammers who are undermining Western sanctions.

They include oil traders in the United Arab Emirates, moneymen in offshore financial jurisdictions in the Caribbean, those who set up shell companies and trusts that disguise ownership, and the middlemen who facilitate Russian deals with other rogue states like Venezuela. Myanmar and African dictatorships.

To their shame, many of these people are British – and should face criminal penalties for helping Putin.

Those from all countries should be banned from visas if they try to travel to other western countries. American passport holders would find themselves unable to visit Britain, and vice versa. Europe could also add sanctions.

Which brings me to one last possible course of action – perhaps the most bizarre. Many would say that Putin’s murder of Navalny, the murder of other opponents and his warmongering have all made him a legitimate target.

To put it plainly: is it time to help Ukraine kill the Russian dictator?

Kiev’s drone attacks on buildings in Moscow last year showed President Zelensky’s willingness to locate targets within the Russian government complex. It’s reasonable to assume that if it’s possible for a crack team of its killers to take out their country’s tormentor, they will try.

Many would hope that our intelligence services will give them the support they need, arguing that the Russians have launched a deadly rough game. They now have to play by their own rules.

Putin’s assassination would obviously be fraught with difficulties. He is infamous for his use of double-dealing: ensuring that the real chief was killed would not be an easy matter.

The most important thing is that Putin is just one man. Our real problem is with Russian imperialism. That predates him and will outlive him. This is the real mess, and one of our making.

On Sunday, former President Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, threatened nuclear retaliation against Britain, Germany and the US if the Kremlin’s occupying army is expelled from eastern Ukraine.

“Attempts to restore Russia’s 1991 borders will lead to only one thing: a global war with Western countries using our entire strategic arsenal against Kiev, Berlin, London and Washington,” he ranted.

This apocalyptic threat is due to Western weakness, not only vis-à-vis Ukraine, but also the three decades of greed and complacency as Russia turned from communism to gangsterism.

From the early 1990s until almost two years ago, I and others were patronized and belittled for warning that Russia, while weak after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was not friendly.

As a result, the West systematically underestimated Moscow’s military and other threats and failed to arm itself against a changing world. We now have aircraft carriers that are not seaworthy, warships that do not have enough crews, fighter jets without pilots and regiments without enough soldiers.

Our supplies of spare parts and ammunition are so limited that within a week or two of the outbreak of war our frontline forces would be limited to repairing bayonets.

The situation has striking parallels with 1938. But the difference shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War was that a Spitfire could be built from scratch in just a few weeks. The purchase of today’s high-tech weapons can take years.

We must face a new world. The American security guarantee for Europe, which began with D-Day and the Berlin airlift, is dead. The bleak truth is that we can no longer trust Americans to protect us — even before, as is likely, Trump returns to the White House.

Our European allies, meanwhile, are hopelessly divided between those who will fight at all costs, those who will not fight under any circumstances, and a confused center that doesn’t know what it is thinking.

This could be the moment for Britain to take the reins of Europe and take our place at the heart of the continent’s security.

We must do what we can to confront Putin head-on – and not shy away from doing so.

Edward Lucas is the author of The New Cold War: Putin’s Threat to Russia and the West.