And who has paid any cost after Snowden's revelations?
Any equivalent would be more or less entirely downplayed or ignored by Russian media. Did the same happen in the US/etc.?
A member of the House of Lords, Lord Lea, has written to the London Review of Books saying that shortly before she died, fellow peer and former MI6 officer Daphne Park told him Britain had been involved in the death of Patrice Lumumba, the elected leader of the Congo, in 1961.
When he asked her whether MI6 might have had something to do with it, he recalls her saying: "We did. I organised it."
And in modern times. Russia would be screaming out of their lungs and threatening nuclear war if CIA or MI6 murdered someone in Moscow with plutonium tea.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvi...
You can also use some examples from the Boer war or even the Opium wars...
Nobody is equating Putin with Stalin either (he's more of a miserable version of Mussolini if we're being fair...)