What does Putin do next? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take a deeper look at the future for the Russian leader.

• Furious Putin is trapped in a gilded cage. Only death will free him
• The worst war the Soviets ever fought is now haunting Putin
• Burnham is facing the ‘Putin test’. Four things he must do to defeat him

Revenge is a dish served both hot and cold by the Kremlin. High on the menu for what Moscow has in store for the UK in view of the latest threats for British support of Ukraine must be targeted assassination – a chosen method of attack which has been used for millennia.

The deal just struck by Andy Burnham on his first prime ministerial visit to Kyiv will only compound the pique of team Putin that the UK is more than a cheerleader, but now a serious ally of Ukraine in its battle for survival. Ukraine will now be able to make its own versions of the effective UK-French Storm Shadow/Scalp cruise missile. More significant is the data-sharing deal with Ukraine giving access to its Avengers data base and AI experience of four years of war. In itself this is a game changer. The Russian junta of Putin and his securitocracy will not like it.

The intelligence agencies, counter-terror units and the National Crime Agency must be on high alert for another bout of murders by Russian agents or their proxies, now that Kremlin propagandists have declared that the Brits are going to get their comeuppance for supplying a new generation of medium-range drones now attacking Russia.

This time the threat must be taken even more seriously. Given Moscow’s record and the alleged plots against defence executives elsewhere in Europe, another Russian assassination attempt in Britain is firmly on the cards.

For two years now, the leaders of Western European arms and aerospace companies have been under threat. In 2024, the head of Germany’s principal military supplier Rheinmetall, Armin Papperger, was a target for a Russian hit squad – and he has been under full protection ever since. This month it was reported that Stefan Thumann, founder of a German start-up Donaustahl, has been living hiding since Christmas.

Russian agencies have form for targeted assassinations in Britain. Most spectacular was the gruesome killing of the intelligence expert and double agent Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006. In March 2018, agents from the GRU arm of the Interior Ministry tried to kill the double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury. They were saved, but Dawn Sturgess died months later from Novichok poisoning after her boyfriend opened a perfume bottle containing the agent, which he had fished out of a trash bin.

Both attacks were marked by the brazen and almost casually incompetent mode of attack. Litvinenko was killed by a dose of Polonium-210, a radioactive isotope, deemed “a billion times more lethal than cyanide” according to experts. It was administered in a teapot at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, after a visit to Litvinenko by a former Russian intelligence colleague Andrey Lugovoy. Traces of the deadly polonium were found in several spots across Mayfair, cars and two planes. Some of it was just thrown away down the lavatory and the teapot put into a dishwasher. Lugovoy was charged with murder, and extradition was applied for. To no avail. He was elected deputy to the Duma and became a privileged member of Putin’s new Russia.

Just two years after the Owen enquiry reported, the Skripals were attacked in Salisbury. Again, there is a silent movie craziness about the way the plot unfolded. Agents from the GRU military intelligence agency visited Salisbury and plastered the doorhandle of the small house of Sergei Skripal, a double agent being visited by his daughter Yulia, with the deadly military agent Novichok. The two intended victims were found comatose and frothing at the mouth on a park bench in the middle of Salisbury, and saved in the nick of time. Again, the perpetrators seem to have spread Novichok, a favourite nerve agent of the Russian military from Cold War days, in promiscuous amounts – causing life-changing injury to the first detective into the house, Sergeant Nick Bailey.

During the parliamentary debates on the Skripal poisonings, the home secretary Amber Rudd stated that the security agencies and police were tasked with further investigation of 14 “unexplained deaths of Russian exiles in Britain” in the past decade, though the police said there was no basis on which to “re-open any of the investigations”.

The murky world of spies and assassinations, dirty money and dodgy oligarchs, strikes a rich artistic and creative seam in both British and Russian culture. It is a world cloaked with the atmosphere of the spy novels of John Le Carré, who has a strong following in Russia, and his genius spymaster George Smiley.

The strange mutual obsession of Moscow with London endures – the King, the underground, the skulduggery and mind games, the lot. A friend who has intermittent contact with journalism trainees in Moscow told me “when they are told how to get in touch with foreign embassies, they are warned one is off limits, not to be touched – verboten! It’s the Brits of course.”

Targeted assassination is now commonplace in the wars of our time, and a particular favourite of the Israelis, as well as the Saudis and the Americans. Looking at this century alone, many a spectacular individual killing has not turned out the way the perpetrators intended.

In the opening days of the 2026 on-off war in Iran, American and Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, many of his family, key functionaries like Ali Larijani and Iranian commanders. Today, the regime headed by the injured successor Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, and the cabal of commanders, Ahmad Vahidi, Mohsen Rezaee, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf seem far tougher and cunning than their slain predecessors.

Russia and Ukraine have a grim record of sponsored killings, often of their own. Generals and officials fall out of favour, and then fall out of windows or disappear mysteriously. On August 20, 2022, Darya Dugina, 29, was blown up in a car outside Moscow. The bomb was likely intended for her father Professor Alexander Dugin, Putin’s favourite ideologue, whose views on the supporting the special military operation in Ukraine she fulsomely endorsed in her journalism.

This week, Alexander Dugin warned – on my X feed and millions of others – that it is time to stop avoiding the issue, Russia needs to attack the Nato allies with a full-on offensive.

Today, London has no Russian ambassador. Andrey Kelin left the post after seven years in July. Moscow has not seen fit to replace him. It’s a diplomatic shadowland of neither war nor peace. A playground for assassins and spies, the world of Le Carré for our time.