Moscow has named a square in honour of Kim Philby, one of Britain’s worst traitors, in a seemingly provocative response to condemnation of the Kremlin over the nerve agent attack in Salisbury.

Sergei Sobyanin, the Moscow mayor and one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, personally ordered that an obscure intersection in the south west of the city be renamed ‘Kim Philby Square’.

The decree was published on Moscow city’s local government website on Tuesday.

Local residents expressed bewilderment that the junction was being renamed after Philby when he never lived in the neighbourhood. A Moscow city hall spokesman declined to comment on why the road junction was being renamed after Philby and the timing of it.

But eyebrows will be raised that Moscow is doing so just weeks after the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence unit, was identified as being behind the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in March. Colonel Skripal, 67, was poisoned with novichok nerve agent but survived the attack along with his daughter Yulia, 33.

In the wake of the attack, Theresa May pledged to dismantle the GRU while the two men who carried it out were unmasked as senior GRU agents who had been awarded Russia’s highest honour by Mr Putin.