On Monday, British Prime Minister Theresa May said it was “highly likely” that the Russian government was behind the attack that has left Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia critically ill, calling it “an unlawful use of force by the Russian State against the United Kingdom.”

But when White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked repeatedly about the incident at a press conference in Washington DC later on Monday, she would not say whether the American government agreed with this attribution, and did not mention Russia by name. Britain says it will expel 23 Russian diplomats after Moscow shrugged off demands to explain how a deadly Soviet-era nerve agent came to be used in the English town of Salisbury to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
The United Kingdom expels 23 Russian diplomats and cuts off all top-level ties with Russia as punishment for a reported attack with the Novichok military-grade nerve agent, an attack which Prime Minister Theresa May described as an "unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom".