Perfidious Albion is, we are told, at it again. In the course of a wide-ranging and often quite surreal speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Vladimir Putin accused Britain of being behind attempted nuclear terrorism, rhetorically asking whether the government was ‘trying to provoke us into retaliating against Ukrainian atomic power stations’ or whether the British Prime Minister even ‘knows what his secret services are doing in Ukraine?’

Needless to say, no evidence is forthcoming to support Putin’s claims that a number of Ukrainian ‘saboteurs’ had been intercepted and detailed by Russia’s Federal Security Service on their way to...