The 66-year-old man looked “out of it,” one witness said. Sitting on a bench outside a shopping mall in Salisbury, in the United Kingdom on March 5, he was looking skyward, making strange gestures. A woman was slumped against him, already unconscious. Passersby paid them no heed, assuming they were drunk, until someone called the police.

The man was double agent Sergei Skripal, a colonel in Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, who also worked for the UK’s MI6. Jailed by Russia for treason in 2006, he relocated with his wife to the UK following a spy swap in 2010. Now he and the woman, who turned out to be his 33-year-old daughter Yulia, lie critically ill in a hospital after coming into contact with an “unknown substance,” according to British police. The poison (which police identified on March 7 as a nerve agent) worked fast: CCTV shows the pair walking normally just minutes earlier. The police officer first on the scene is also hospitalized in serious condition.

This Cold War-style assassination attempt undoubtedly can be traced to the Kremlin. Fourteen other people, many of them Russian exiles, have died under suspicious circumstances in the UK in the last two decades since Vladimir Putin took power in Russia.

The British government has concluded that the most famous of them — former Russian FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko — was murdered by Russian agents who laced his tea with polonium-210. An inquiry concluded that Russian agent Andrey Lugovoy, now a lawmaker in Russia’s parliament and host of an upcoming television show called “Traitors,” was among the guilty. Russia has refused to extradite him. The British also concluded Putin approved the killing.

Why do so many Russians die mysteriously in the UK? Britain, since the fall of the Soviet Union, has allowed itself to become a parking spot for cash looted from Russia. Russian oligarchs and corrupt officials have turned parts of London into deserted neighborhoods of empty luxury real estate. The ill-gotten gains of Russian organized crime are laundered through London. British overseas tax havens are used by Russia’s rich to set up webs of sham companies that conceal their ownership.

The UK has imported corruption from Russia on a grand scale. The murder of Litvinenko, which the British government downplayed for a decade so as not to ruffle the Kremlin’s feathers, and attempted murder of Skripal, are a predictable side effect of welcoming gangsters. It’s time that the West, and the UK government in particular, woke up to the nature of the Putin regime: It is a mafia state, a fusion of organized crime kept in place by an oppressive security apparatus. Putin is simply the nuclear-armed mafia head. As long as the UK government tolerates Putin, there will be more gangland killings of Russians on British streets