Putin, are you listening?

Washington’s expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats from the U.S. as punishment for the nerve agent poisoning of a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom is being framed as a brawny, “We’re-mad-as-hell” message to Vladimir Putin. The move, said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, makes clear to Russia “that its actions have consequences.”

We can imagine the former KGB agent’s reaction as he reads that his diplomats, branded as spies, have a handful of days to pack up and head back to Mother Russia. What’s the Russian word for “meh”?

President Donald Trump had to take some action to express American outrage. The former spy, Sergei Skripal, lies comatose in a British hospital in critical condition, the victim of the March 4 attack with Novichok. That’s a rare nerve agent secretly developed by the old Soviet Union and thought to be 10 times more powerful than the chemical weapon VX. The U.S. and a bevy of other Western nations have joined the U.K. in blaming the attack on Russia, an accusation Moscow denies. More than two dozen countries, most of them European, also have kicked out Russian diplomats in response to the Skripal poisoning, bringing the total number of expulsions to more than 150. On Thursday, the Kremlin reciprocated in usual fashion by announcing the tit-for-tat expulsion of 150 Western diplomats from Russia, 60 of them American.

If Washington thinks expelling Russian diplomats will get Putin to repent, maybe we can sell the Trump administration beachfront property in Vladivostok.

There’s an air of futility to expelling people — a sense that doing so is a proportionate response for a poisoning, but doesn’t address Russia’s other bold offenses. Russians have meddled in a presidential election, hacked into America’s energy grid and made Facebook and Twitter unwitting hosts for bot-driven propaganda. Losing a batch of diplomat-spies in other lands won’t dent the Kremlin game plan. And if Washington was certain these diplomats are spies worth expelling now, why haven’t they been kicked out before? Note that we haven’t even mentioned Russia’s interventions in Ukraine and Syria.

The Trump team clearly wants Putin to know it means business. And yes, the expulsions do echo Trump’s mid-March sanctions on Russian groups and individuals over the cybermeddling. Yet there’s a more effective way to punish Russia.

Putin’s Kremlin cronies have boatloads of cash stashed in Western investments and bank accounts. That’s how Western governments can really grind Putin’s gears — by hitting his closest comrades with asset freezes or seizures.

The best place to start would be the U.K., where oligarchs allied with Putin have billions of dollars invested in real estate. Britain even has a law that allows authorities to seize assets obtained with ill-gotten wealth. Memo to Prime Minister Theresa May: Stop stalling. Use that law. The poisoning of Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter, who also remains hospitalized, demands it. Remember, Skripal and his daughter weren’t the only victims of this incident. Scores of innocents were exposed to the nerve agent in the attack, essentially a hostile nation’s use of chemical weapons on NATO territory.

If you’re Putin, you see a West that takes only baby steps to confront you: In addition to the expulsions, the U.S. is shutting down Russia’s consulate in Seattle. Iceland and Britain won’t send top government officials to Russia when it hosts the World Cup this summer. But will any of that intimidate Putin? Doubtful.

“The key question for me is whether all this — and whatever else is to follow — will finally persuade Putin that the cost of killing off enemies and ‘traitors’ and subverting other people’s societies in order to ‘make Russia great again’ just isn’t worth it,” Peter Westmacott, a former British ambassador to the U.S., told The New York Times.

That’s the right question to ask. Freezing or seizing the assets of Putin’s pals is the right answer.

— Chicago Tribune