Oleg Gordievsky: An inadequate response to this assassination

Britain's decision to expel four "diplomats" to protest Russia's failure to extradite the suspected murderer of Alexander Litvinenko is totally pathetic.

The Russian state has killed a British citizen on British soil with a highly toxic radioactive poison which endangered the British public. At the very least, the Russian ambassador, and the intelligence service station chief in London should be among those packing their bags.

Related articles

• Leading article: A difficult balance of justice and diplomacy
• Britain expels Russian diplomats as row over Litvinenko murder grows
• Mary Dejevsky: A fight with Russia we cannot hope to win
• Search the news archive for more stories

It is worth remembering that after the KGB, with help from Bulgarian intelligence, killed the BBC journalist Georgi Markov with a poisoned umbrella on Waterloo bridge in 1978, relations between the UK and Bulgaria remained strained for a quarter of a century.

So it should be with Russia, whose agents have carried out an assassination in the most brutal and ruthless way. The murder of my friend Alexander Litvinenko with the radioactive isotope polonium-210 has been thoroughly investigated from start to finish. British scientists and police know exactly which Russian state nuclear facility provided the polonium.

In my view, this is an open-and-shut case of state assassination, ordered by Vladimir Putin himself. In fact, he signed two orders: one to kill Litvinenko because he wanted him out of the way, and the second, a $9m submission to buy the polonium, which is extremely expensive. The ambassador should have known about the plan because he is Putin's representative in the UK.

Yet the British government is only expelling four diplomats, presumed to be intelligence agents.

In 1971, Britain expelled 105 Soviet officers after unmasking a superspy. In 1985 they expelled the KGB station of 25 officers. So expelling four diplomats is just a drop in the ocean.

This is such a terrible crime that it deserves to be punished appropriately.

The former KGB team who killed Litvinenko came here in the spring last year to begin preparing for the murder which they carried out on 1 November after a rehearsal in mid-October.

But they made two mistakes: they thought he would die from the radioactive poisoning on the seventh or eight day, whereas he survived for 18 days; they also failed to realise that polonium can be very easily detected, and the police picked up the traces everywhere - at the Russian embassy, at a London hotel, at a sushi restaurant and in Boris Berezovsky's office. They just didn't know it was so traceable.

That is where the British scientists were so clever with their equipment. Litvinenko spoke to the police every day, and to everyone he knew, including me, after the poisoning so they had a full picture of his life. Even though they only realised that it was polonium-210 on the final day of Litvinenko's life, they know exactly who put the lethal dose in the teapot at the Millennium Hotel.

I am convinced that Putin himself ordered Litvinenko's murder because this is the way Russia works. It is not Britain or America, which have different centres of power. There is only one centre of power in Russia and that is the Kremlin. The former KGB agent had been a thorn in his side for too long, and his critical articles were read by too many people on the internet for Putin's liking.

When Litvinenko was on his deathbed, accusing Putin of killing him, he knew what he was saying.

So there is absolutely no point in expelling just four diplomats. The London operations of Russian intelligence should have been beheaded.

Oleg Gordievsky, a former colonel in the KGB, was a double agent and the most senior Soviet spy ever to defect to Britain. He was awarded the honour of the Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George (CMG) last month for services to the security of the UK