SPARE a thought for the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. Last year two of its officers were implicated in a plot to kill Montenegro’s prime minister. This July, 12 more of its officers were indicted by America’s special counsel, for interfering in the presidential election in 2016. Now Britain has named another pair of alleged GRU men as suspects in the attempted murder of a former spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, in Salisbury in March. It has published photos of the would-be assassins, who went by the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. Russia’s secret wars are growing less secret by the month.

British police traced the suspects’ journey from Gatwick airport to a hotel in east London, then twice to Salisbury, where they are said to have sprayed a military-grade nerve agent on Mr Skripal’s front door. Their weapon of choice, a bottle of perfume modified to carry poison, was recklessly discarded, resulting in the death of a local. British investigators pored through 11,000 hours of CCTV footage, probably cross-referencing individuals on flights from Russia with those in Salisbury. That the pair arrived on Russia’s flag-carrier, Aeroflot, and had previously travelled on the same passports, including to Britain, suggests sloppy tradecraft or remarkable insouciance.

Mr Skripal’s former role in the GRU, the agency’s reputation for punishing defectors and its hacking of e-mails of Mr Skripal’s daughter all pointed to its involvement. Theresa May told the House of Commons on September 5th that not only did the two men work for the GRU, the operation was “almost certainly” approved at a “senior level of the Russian state”, meaning Vladimir Putin.

No one expects Russia to give up its nationals—if indeed they are still alive. Its foreign ministry said their names and photographs “do not mean anything to Moscow”. A state-TV anchor compared Britain’s claims to a Hollywood script. When Britain exposed the Russian agents behind the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB officer, in London in 2006, Russia not only refused demands for the agents’ extradition but awarded a medal, for “services to the motherland”, to one of the alleged assassins.

Nevertheless, this week’s revelations serve a purpose. The wide dissemination of the suspects’ mugshots means their days as travelling killers, if that is what they were, are over. And the steady accumulation of evidence of Russian culpability bolsters the Western consensus that Mr Putin’s behaviour is out of hand. Fresh sanctions may follow.

This would not be the first time CCTV had exposed a secret hit-squad. In 2010 an Israeli team of assassins was caught on camera in Dubai, resulting in a diplomatic scandal over Israel’s use of fake passports from Western countries. Cameras, facial recognition and biometric technology at ports of entry are making it harder to cross borders untraceably. This is bad news for Russia. Whether meddling in Crimea, America or Britain, it relies on plausible deniability. There is no longer much plausibility left.