The extent of the challenge posed by Russia to Britain and its allies should not be exaggerated. Although it is boastful of its armed strength, Russia’s military spending fell by 20% last year, to a level below that of Saudi Arabia and one-tenth the equivalent US figure. In GDP terms, it lags well behind the US, Germany, the UK and France. Russia’s contracting economy, damaged by western sanctions, is unhealthily dependent on fluctuating oil and gas sales, which represent about 70% of exports. It suffers massive wealth inequality, low life expectancy, rising poverty and a gaping democratic deficit.

While the eras of tsarist and communist dominance are over, Russia remains effectively a one-party state ruled by a strongman leader with largely unchecked powers. Vladimir Putin, who has held that position since 2000, has been likened to a mafia don running his homeland like a protection racket. Friends, family, and business and political allies are rewarded for loyalty. Enemies and rivals are ruthlessly extirpated. By one estimate, corruption, much of it officially facilitated and approved, sucks up 48% of GDP.

Putin’s view of the world beyond Russia is both resentful and fearful. He mourns the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he served as a KGB spy. He believes passionately that the west seeks to deny Russia its rightful great power status. With his crude “scumbag” language and aggressive external conspiracies, overt and covert, he daily demonstrates a visceral need for revenge. But Putin, ultimately, is a weak man playing a weak hand.

That said, it remains critically important to keep on top of the evolving threat from Moscow. Last week brought new revelations about a ham-fisted Russian espionage operation in the Netherlands and cyberwarfare campaigns in the UK, US and elsewhere. It is true, as Putin says, that spying is one of the world’s oldest professions. It would be naive to think it will stop. But it is sensible to use all possible means to expose it, however clumsy it may be at times. In this respect, the unusual decision of the UK security services to publish documented and photographic evidence of Russian subversion is very welcome. May this new spirit of openness continue.

What else should be done? Russia is already labouring under successive rounds of sanctions imposed after its annexation of Crimea and murderous attack in Salisbury. Efforts to target money-laundering through London should certainly be stepped up. It would help, too, if Donald Trump stopped appeasing his Russian buddy.

If additional, meaningful punishment is contemplated, then the concerted ostracism of Russia internationally, from diplomatic forums to sporting events, could be considered.

Russian efforts to hack the Porton Down laboratories, the Foreign Office, and the UN’s chemical weapons watchdog in The Hague are a reminder of how the use of cyberwarfare, by many countries, is escalating. Both Britain and the US have increased spending on cyber-defences and have reportedly expanded offensive capabilities, too. Others are rapidly following suit or, like China, may be ahead of the game.

Yet it is often smaller countries, and private sector businesses such as banks and utilities, that are most at risk both from state actors and criminal enterprises. Just look at Estonia, which suffered the first big cyber-attack in 2007, or the western Balkans – and Facebook – at the moment.

Growing numbers of British online customers have personal experience of the impact of hacking. They require greater protection. Cyberwarfare is to the 21st century what the English longbow was to armoured French knights at Agincourt, or America’s atomic bomb to Japan in 1945. It changes everything.

Last week’s impressive display of coordination between the US, British and Dutch authorities demonstrated the vital importance of international collaboration in pushing back at Russia and at as yet unknown future threats.

Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, was in self-congratulatory mood about how isolated Putin has become. Yet is Hunt aware how isolated he himself is following his offensive and disgraceful comment likening the EU to the Soviet Union?

As an understandably outraged Donald Tusk, president of the European council, pointed out, people in his native Poland and elsewhere in eastern and central Europe have terrible personal memories of life lived under the boot of Putin’s beloved Soviet empire. Hunt does not – and his show of ignorance was alarming. If he wants to be taken seriously as a foreign minister on the world stage, and avoid undermining the very international cooperation he lauded last week, Hunt should apologise unreservedly.

More than ever, as Britain stumbles blindly towards the Brexit trapdoor, the country needs its foreign friends. Tory Leavers of all stripes must understand that insulting them for cheap party political advantage betrays this country’s national interest and provides comfort to lurking gangsters such as Putin.